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Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration Series Returns to MoMA

From 1915 onward, six million black Southerners quit that region for points north in an epic tide of souls fleeing oppression and seeking opportunity. This spring, the Museum of Modern Art will honor the Great Migration’s centennial by reuniting Jacob Lawrence’s famous paintings of this mass movement, a suite of 60 panels to be shown at MoMA for the first time since 1994.

The exhibition is part of an ambitious project to bring fresh perspectives on the legacy of the migration through new works commissioned from poets, authors and filmmakers inspired by Lawrence, one of the most renowned artists of mid-20th-century Modernism.

Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” the award-winning 2010 book, noted that for many people, Lawrence’s epic 1940-41 artwork is one of the first introductions to that sweeping movement north. Politics, housing patterns, food, music — every aspect of American culture owes something to the migration, Ms. Wilkerson said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. “Because it’s so big and so embedded in who we are, it’s hard to see,” she said. “There’s so much to study — it’s almost like studying 20th-century culture itself.”

Read entire article at NYT