Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Series

September 14, 2013–April 13, 2014

Painter Jacob Lawrence is known for using a series format to render in colorful expressive imagery and text the narrative stories of historical African American figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Each of the eight works on view in Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Series (1990) describes a passage from the book of Genesis in the King James version of the Bible. The series reflects Lawrence’s youthful memories of passionate sermons about the Creation given by ministers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where he was baptized in 1932. The Genesis Series, loaned from Eddie and Sylvia Brown’s Baltimore collection, features the same unity and visual eloquence of his earlier series and has a powerful, expressive impact.

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