Jacob Lawrence. American Painter. - SIGNED

Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1986. Used; Like New/Used; Like New. Oversize 4to softcover. 235 pp, including six chapters, a chronology, checklist of the exhibition with thumbnail illustrations etc. Inscribed and signed on the red ffe "For Alan" and dated 8/26/86, likely to someone associated with the museum, with a Seattle Museum business card of Helen Abbott, Public Relations Manager, laid in.  An attractive signed example of this stunning catalog for the career retrospective Seattle Art Museum exhibition of the important American artist who taught at the University of Washington from 1971 to 1986. With 4 paperclip indentations to page edges, some dog eared lower page corners, and notations in black pen to a number of pages, especially in the exhibition checklist. 
Though he came of age before the Civil Rights Movement brought African Americans the rights they had long been denied, Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917–2000) forged a prominent career as an artist, chronicling the story of black life in America through his paintings. Born in New Jersey and raised from the age of thirteen in Harlem, New York City, this Northeast native had southern roots. He was the child of migrants who moved, together with millions of other African Americans, from the impoverished rural South to urban, industrialized Midwestern and Northeastern cities during the mass relocation known as the Great Migration (1915–1950s). Lawrence maintained that he was "a child of the Great Migration," which shaped the course of his own and his fellow African Americans' lives.  If the Great Migration provided him with geographical advantages, it was Harlem, then in the midst of the cultural and intellectual outpouring known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s), that inspired him to make art. As he once described his beloved neighborhood: "All these people on the street, various colors, so much pattern, so much movement, so much color, so much vitality, so much energy." The textures of Harlem, and the narrative dynamism of the songs, Bible stories, sermons, and tales of his neighbors' journeys north that he witnessed in church, shaped Lawrence's approach to art making. He realized that through painting he, too, could give voice to the experiences of his people.