Points of Departure: Understanding Human Migration

Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series portrays conditions that precipitated the exodus of African Americans out of the south as well as the complexities encountered by the migrants upon their arrival and settlement in the northern states.

Alejandro Santiago, also, sought to portray a historic event; one which we can witness today. 2,501 Migrants: A Journey consists of life-sized sculptures exemplifying absence. Returning to Oaxaca after a decade abroad, the artist was alarmed by the number of Mexicans leaving their ancestral village to cross a deadly desert in search of a better life.  As with Jacob Lawrence, Santiago’s work mirrors the impetus to move from south to north, from rural to urban, and the consequences wrought of that decision and its impact on the family unit. 

Where I’m Bound: African Americans and Migration in Art and Life

It began with a poem! Reading the Langston Hughes poem One-Way Ticket inspired Jacob Lawrence to make a sketch of a train station waiting room filled with travelers, travelers like the ones seeking The Warmth of Other Suns. As a boy who became an artist, he knew about traveling. Lawrence moved from city to city and house to house until his mother, finally, found a place in Harlem for them to call home.

“I was part of the migration,“ he says “as was my family… I was only
about 10, 11, or 12. I didn’t realize that we were even a part of that….I didn’t
realize what was happening until the middle of the 1930s, and that’s
when the Migration series began to take form in my mind.” 

In 1941, at the age of 23, Lawrence began painting works in a series that would become known as The Migration Series. Bookended by World War I and World War II, the work portrays an exodus, at once sweeping and, yet, singular in its focus. Long before his wet brush met a dry canvas, Lawrence had steeped himself in the works of writers and intellectuals focused on the Black migration and the role of the artist in art and culture. Where did he do so? At the library! The New York Public Library’s Division of Negro History, Literature and Prints, now known as The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was instrumental in the artist’s development and formation of the work.