“One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North” MoMA Exhibit reunites all 60 art panels for the first time in 20 years
The enlightening conversation that took place Wednesday April 15 was sponsored by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in conjunction with the “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North” exhibit now displayed at MoMA. The event was moderated by three leaders and social-justice activists: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Sherrilyn Ifill, President, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Cornell Brooks, President and CEO, NAACP; as they discussed the legacy of Jim Crow and gave a narrative to Lawrence’s exhibit.
In 1941, 23-year-old Jacob Lawrence, completed a series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration, the multi-decade mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North that started around 1915. Within months of its making, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), with each institution acquiring half of the panels. “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North” reunites all 60 panels for the first time in 20 years.
Wednesday’s discussion was a narrative for the exhibit as they spoke on the issues addressed in Lawrence’s 60 panels that are currently on display. The main theme of the work of art and the panel addresses the social causes for migration of Blacks from the South to the North in America during the 30’s through the 40’s; addressing the conditions and issues such as racism, education, voting, and the main conversation was focused on lynching.
We really need this Art to help us understand our history, the present moment we’re in, and to see a path forward.”
-Sherrilyn Ifill
The MoMA sponsored event started by asking the following three questions and several related questions to the three activists regarding Lawrence’s exhibit:
1. How do we understand the long history of Jacob Lawrence’s concerns?
2. How do we understand the relationship between Jacob Lawrence’s great migration series and current events today?
3. How can we position understanding and knowledge of these momentous and critical events to make our society a better place?
The 106-year-old organization, NAACP, was represented along with it’s cousin organization NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; which was founded by Thurgood Marshall, an advocate on poverty, inequality, bridging the gap between rich and poor, and human rights. Both advocates spoke on how their organizations where present during the era represented in the exhibit, and they agreed that lynching was one of the major causes for migration during those times.
Racism effects the judicial system, and this was the main point made since Marshall represented cases such as Brown vs The Board of Education, Jim Crow criminal cases of the 20th century, and the influential “Little Scottsboro” case in Groveland, Florida in 1949. In the Groveland case, four young African-American men were falsely accused of the rape of a white, married, teenaged woman in the orange growing region of central Florida. Two of the men were guilty of little more than stopping to aid a pair of stranded motorists, while the other two were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime. Thurgood Marshall, the legendary NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney and later Supreme Court justice, labored to save one of them from execution. The exhibit will share the plight of Black America and the Civil Rights Movement in a powerful visual display of art for this generation to acknowledge and learn from.
Be sure to check out the One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North now at MoMa. Visit MoMa.org for more details and exhibit hours.
-InfiniteWiz (@InfiniteWiz)
