Temporal Assertiveness Through Materiality in Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series
Although very little of the literature I read during my research into Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series was theoretical, many of the authors put forth ideas around this work which I would like to develop further in my essay. Jacqueline Francis touches on the importance of movement to this piece, materially in the work and figuratively in the subject matter. Since the concept of movement is the focal point of the work, it is very easily overlooked as being the obvious topic of discussion when reading this piece. Jacob Lawrence, however, parallels the visual depictions of movement and migration with the subtle movement and flow of the eye by using the same colours in each of the panels, as discussed by Elizabeth Steele and Susana Halpine in their writing, as well as insisting the show be toured for many years to reflect the migrant's decade long journey. Jutta Lorenses’s essay, “Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series” was an incredible source because of its depth of analysis on the connection and function of text and image in Lawrence’s work, a colour palette which spans all 60 panels, and the positioning of the migrants throughout the series. Lorensen illustrates the purpose of the Migration Series not as a historical painting, but as an “auditory witnessing” borne from stories Lawrence heard as a child in tandem with research he conducted. These readings were the most insightful of the literature I explored for my research of this piece; however all of the readings, these included, on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series lack a depth of analysis touching on the effects of the work for the viewer and marginalized groups. They all describe in great detail the materials, methods, struggles, influences, and consequences of Lawrence’s piece, but they lack any sense of contemporaneity in that they ignore the sensorial, emotional, and intellectual effect this work invokes from viewers within and outside of the black community. Even Lorensen’s writing which analyzes the work in great depth does so to tease out greater details of the piece that have gone unnoticed, but does not, and effectively can not, speak to the experience of the work from a black person's perspective, given that she is not black herself. The opportunity to speak on the effects of the work in the past and present for the black community is missed, even by those theorists who belong to the black community. This work speaks to an event experienced from and because of a position of othering, which seems to have been overlooked by all of these writings.
Within the Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence, there is a great deal of storytelling that spans the length of all 60 panels and their accompanying text. This is done through a continuing colour palette, captions, as well as a subject matter painted in a striking style. However, another kind of storytelling occurs within and without the work, one which implicates the viewer more directly. Conceptual art historian Okwui Enwezor states that, like many types of conceptual art, “African Art is object bound, but in its meaning and intention it is paradoxically anti-object and antiperceptual” (“Where, What, Who, When”, p. 110). Conceptual art has, at its centre, a desire to transcend its materiality in favour of ideational presence which more directly implicates the viewer in its interpretation. In the Migration Series there exists a space in which parallel stories and meanings are opened up to the viewer, similar to what other conceptual artworks strive to achieve through their separation from physicality. However, Lawrence’s Migration Series does so without sacrificing its presence as a material object. It asserts its presence in space and time and begs perception by forcing the viewer to be there with it. Jutta Lorensen, in her analysis of the Migration Series, states that “an engaged investigation into… the form- rather than the theme- of the Migration Series has been virtually absent from the critical discussion so far” (573). I found this to be entirely true in my research, given that only a single essay, Lorensen’s “Between Image and Word, Colour and Time: Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series”, attempted to investigate the form of Lawrence’s work in any depth. In this essay, I will explore the form of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, and the purpose of a variety of devices used to both implicate the viewer/reader in a more participatory experience of the work and simultaneously assert the work in its physical and temporal location.
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series is not the first of its kind to employ text in conjunction with visually extensive work. Other artists of his time, such as Faith Ringgold, also used inlaid or accompanying text in their practice. In Lawrence’s piece, however, the captions often diverge from the scenes depicted in each panel, creating a space between the two in which events occur although they are not visually or textually represented. In many of his panels, the “verbal and the visual seem to bypass each other completely” (Lorensen, 575). Panels 15 and 16, in particular, are exemplary of the fracturing of storytelling between text and image. In panel 15, a black woman kneels before a long branch, attached to which is a noose accompanied by the words “Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.” In panel 16, the same woman, denoted by her bright orange dress, with her head hung in a position much like the one she possessed in panel 15, sits at a table and is paired with the text “Although the Negro was used to lynching, he found this an opportune time for him to leave where one had occurred.” The rupture between the text and image is strikingly clear in these two panels. Between them is the violence of lynching and the despair of the community surrounding the victim. The temporal and descriptive space created by the seeming lack of a link between panel and caption is one that implicates the viewer entirely in its execution. The viewer must be willing to imagine and therefore subject themselves to the pain of a supposed lynching. This level of involvement on the part of the viewer is commonly seen in conceptual art. Like most conceptual art, the Migration Series allows for engagement with the piece that is open-ended, not through departure from materiality as is common within the conceptual tendency, but rather through the grounding of the work in multiple forms of media and the spaces between them.
Furthermore, Lawrence uses a consistent colour palette not only as a tool of visual movement but also as a temporal tool in connecting the journey being shown to other great movements of African American peoples, situating this work in a historical timeline and begging the perception of both the events represented in a specific palette within the viewer's mind. Not only does Lawrence explore the spaces between mediums, but he also employs those mediums to refer to parallel events which go unmentioned in this work, but are ever-present in the minds of African-Americans. In their text “Precision and Spontaneity: Jacob Lawrence’s Materials and Techniques”, Susana M. Halpine and Elizabeth Steele explore the precision with which Lawrence prepared his materials and executed the colour palette in the Migration Series. They write that “Lawrence conceived of the series as a single work of art, not as sixty individual paintings… he systematically worked on the sixty panels simultaneously… He went on to complete the series by moving from the darker values to the lighter, applying each color to all the panels in succession” (156-157). This precise use of colour forces the viewer to experience the migration in a way that is entirely dictated by Lawrence. His use of unchanging colours creates its very own ‘migration palette’. Given that they cannot imagine the real-life events in anything but the colours before them, the piece asserts itself in the viewer's mind by dictating even their imagination. These migration colours force the participation of the viewer to occur within that palette but also harken back to another historical event. In panel 6, Lawrence depicts a train ride North accompanied by the caption “The trains were packed continually with migrants”. In each seat, he paints the migrants as being the same colour as their neighbour seated next to them, enforcing the idea that the trains were so over-crowded the migrants began to blend. Next to the focus of this panel, a mother sitting in a booth and breastfeeding her child, sits an open suitcase, giving life to the word ‘packed’ in the panel’s caption. Another instance where African-American people were transported en masse in uncomfortable and even dangerous environments is recalled; the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The semiotic meaning of the word packed, which signifies placing an object in a container for transport as well as a place filled by a large number of people, was paramount, I believe, in Lawrence’s choice of words. The colours of the suitcase function as an adjacent exploration of both emigrations - forced and chosen. The Migration Series explores multiple voyages in space and time, and it does so through the very materials which occupy the viewer's entire field of vision. The ‘migration palette’ used by Lawrence, once seen, is forever tied in the viewer's mind to both events which it recalls, implicating the work in any recollection of either migration forever. This colour palette, so different from that of any gallery space within which it was and is currently exhibited, asserts itself in its presence here and now, and recalls the events of there and then.
The final aspect of the Migration Series which is important to discuss is the positioning of the subject matter. Throughout the series, Lawrence uses text and image, as well as colour to create a space outside of what is directly represented in the paintings and captions, a space where events occur and histories are recalled. This space is, without a doubt, an integral part of the ability of this piece to affect those who view it and the devices used by Lawrence ensure that this work remains with the viewer long after they’ve left the gallery. One aspect of the Migrant Series which forces the implication of the viewer as both an observer and a participant in the story being told is the positioning of the subjects. In panel 1, the viewer observes the migrants from the back, as if being left behind or following the crowd. Similarly, in panels 23 and 35, the viewer is to the rear of and beside the migrants, respectively. Throughout the Migrant Series, the viewer is made to be observant in the migrants' lives, while also being implicated in their voyage by being shown events from the perspective of someone within the travelling crowd. This positioning of the migrants as surrounding the viewer denotes certain proximity between the viewer and the events occurring. However, this comes to an abrupt end in the last panel, within which the subjects are facing the viewer head-on, ending their involvement in the story being told quite suddenly. Instead of a group of people on the move, panel 60 shows a group of migrants at a standstill on a train platform, facing outward. This interrupts the sense of participation in the migration experienced by the viewer, ending it so abruptly that the viewer is aware that something has changed, but cannot articulate their sudden uneasy separation from the subject matter. The viewer is, once again, uncomfortably aware of their temporal and spatial location as well as that of the work, showing that the “Migration Series is not only interested in telling a story, narrating the events or "causes" of the Great Migration, but interested as well in linking them to the viewer” (Lorensen, 583). This is a device that implicates the viewer for much of the work, only to reveal to them their inherent distance from the piece. For a black viewer, this space would signal to them the separation from the subjects given with time but does not remove their familiarity with the experiences of the migrants. For a non-black viewer, however, this space would distance them both temporally and experientially, announcing to them that they cannot and will not ever feel truly comprehend the experiences of the migrants.
In conclusion, Jacob Lawrence uses text and image, colour, and the stylization of the subject matter in his work The Migration Series to create a space within which more than one story is being told and the concept of the work can be explored in-depth, without needing to sacrifice materiality or temporal presence to do so. By employing text and image which diverge in their storytelling, Lawrence opens up space for the viewer to subject themselves to intense emotions to read the piece, ensuring a more participatory reading of the work without giving up the assertive presence of material aspects, as much conceptual work does. He also employs a colour palette, enforcing that same series of colours on any memory or recollection that comes to pass in the mind of the viewer. This applies to memories of the migration itself, the subtly referenced the slave trade, and the piece. By forcing the reading of each panel to occur in strict colours, the viewer is implicated in the work from the moment they see it and for the rest of their lives, without being aware that their memories of any related events are unfolding in the ‘migration colours’. Lastly, Lawrence employs a stylistic painting of the subjects in all sixty panels, choosing to position the events from within the masses of migrants travelling to form a connection between viewer and migrant. This involvement builds familiarity between the two until the last panel, in which the viewer is suddenly othered from the migrants by placing them across the train platform, staring directly out of the canvas. Each of these devices draws the viewer into the events occurring, forcing them to participate in those aspects which are so important to the migration story, and deepen their reading of the work emotionally, intellectually, and sensorially through the very assertion of the works material presence. Painting has often been the outcast of conceptual art, believed to be unable to place ideation above its own medium but Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series employs painting precisely because of this othered position within Conceptualism and can offer a telling of the story of the Great Migration in such a way that it achieves the level of involvement on the part of the viewer which conceptual art strives for, not by giving up its materiality, but by enforcing it in every way possible.