Accidents of History

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2020) was one of America’s most important Black artists of the 20th century, widely renowned for his modernist depictions of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures. He witnessed the innovative and improved lifestyles created by the convergence of the Great Migration, the Depression, the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, and he captured it all. Social Realism is the practice of using art – primarily visual art– to highlight political and social issues. It takes a critical look at the poverty, injustice, and corruption within a society and snapshots its ripple effects. Mr. Lawrence did just this, in his signature style of “dynamic cubism” – dark flat human figures contrasting brightly coloured backdrops – producing narrative collections that marked him the first nationally recognized Black artist in America.

The art world has always been elitist, and in the 1940s certainly segregated, but it was around this time that he produced The Migration Series that made him impossible to ignore. Sixty panels of masterwork, a powerful visual epic, documents the historic movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. It is a timeless tale of the global challenges of the 21st century: the movement of bodies across borders, the exhaustive migrant experience and the universal themes of struggle and freedom. This series is the first time a black artist was ever displayed at a New York gallery.

In excavating his work, I was looking for an answer I did not yet know the question for, but I found it anyways.

What happens when people are forced to leave where they want to be?

When they are pushed out, forgotten, unable to sustain the entrapment of the system they are caught in? You see, people are living systems and systems have a current, an energetic pull, a heartbeat, a pulse. Not all people can keep up with the current, and when they are pushed and pulled away there is a hollowness that remains.

All around big cities there is this tension I keep feeling. Pressing into the ribs of our neighbourhoods, causing cramps in the underbelly of the streets. Movement seems not to stop. Migration is in constant flux. Millennials are trapped between a Boomer’s daydream and the unborn’s apocolypse. Homelessness is rampant within cities of abundance. And every time I wonder why, I am reminded it’s not just because contrast functions to remind us of the nature of our non-duality; but because quite frankly our social systems are kind of fucked.

There is chaos and no control, and so we move… across borders, we find new spaces to inhabit, taking with us remnants of the hollowness we left behind. It is an unhealthy thing to drag your wounds around with you – yet we all do. And maybe we do it because this is precisely what’s needed to spark change. The discomfort of not fitting in somewhere, being forced to move on somewhere else. Rejection is a bitter feeling to carry. When whole generations feel rejected, certainly this how we end up with rebellions. The great migration of course led to the civil rights movement, exquisitely captured in his art which then led to another series Struggle: The History of the American People (1954-1956).

How is it that the history keeps repeating itself? We can marvel at Jacob Lawrence’s masterpieces, and we can also be aware of present-day reality. We are living the art we seek. And until we embody the story and exist on the canvas, another great migration will pass us by, and another civil rights movement will occur, and many rebellions will erupt along the way. It is important to pay attention to the social problems. It is even more important to fix the social problems… otherwise we end up standing in art galleries looking at visual documentation of the hardships that people faced which could have been avoided and are somehow happening all over again. And what really is the function of regret but a wasteful emotion?

None of this is intended to scare you. Only to nudge you to look around. I want you to be the change-maker I know that you are. And so, the question for you this week is simple: when do we look back and see the accidents made in history? If you pause and look around in your life, your work, your community… what’s snowballing out of control that you can help to course correct? Where is there a struggle that YOU can help turn into beauty? And whatever it is, do it before it’s too late.

The Migration Series is organized and circulated by The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

'til next Sunday!Z.