About the Artist

American painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is most widely known for the Migration of the Negro, an epic narrative series of sixty paintings that he completed in 1941 at the age of twenty-four. The series, which was painted in bright tempera paints on small hardboard panels — all of which are accompanied by captions — depicts the flight of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during and after the first World War. The series is a unique blend of sensibilities, part mural painting, part social realism, and part modernist abstraction.

The MIT Libraries Digital Collection

The MIT Libraries' Dome Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts collection is a growing collection of images that supports the programs and curriculum in MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. The images extensively document architectural history and design, urban history with a special emphasis on the Boston area, landscape architecture, urban planning, archaeology, photography, fine and applied art and media. Also in this collection are Archivision's 60,000 images of architecture, archaeological sites, gardens, parks and works of art with broad appeal in humanities teaching.