By Show and Tell By Byron Graham By Jamie Siebrase By Bree
Davies By Zoe Yabrove By Zoe Yabrove By Jamie Siebrase By Emilie
Johnson Between the First World War and the 1930s, the United
States experienced an internal population shift unprecedented in
its history. More than 1 million rural blacks left their
sharecropper farms in the South and came north in search of
factory jobs and better living conditions in the industrialized
urban centers of the East and the Midwest. Not even the great
westward expansion of the late nineteenth century took place on
this scale. Yet, unlike the way west, which has spawned entire
genres in literature, film and the fine arts, the way north has
barely been talked about. It did, however, inspire at least one
artist: Jacob Lawrence. In the early 1940s he painted a group of
sixty closely interrelated panels immortalizing this tremendous
movement of people. The resulting mammoth painting cycle is the
subject of Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now on display
at the Denver Art