Jacob Lawrence

In a letter of 1995 to a RISD curator, Lawrence wrote about this piece, which is one of a series of 30 autobiographical drawings:

In 1930, at the age of thirteen, my mother, brother, sister and I (all migrants) arrived in New York's Harlem community. I immediately took to walking the streets of Harlem. For me, it was a most exciting visual experience! Seeing the many produce stands, churches, show makers, cigar makers, penny arcades, tenements, the beautiful lacey fire escapes, pool parlors and the many bars -- I wondered how many "Joe's" there were in the world... The painting to which you refer came out of that experience. It was a period in my life that shall always be remembered and treasured.

[Letter dated February 21, 1995, Museum curatorial files.]

In 1942, a year before being drafted into the US Coast Guard, Lawrence received his third Rosenwald Fellowship. He used it to create his thirty-panel genre series entitled "Harlem," an intimate autobiographical work created within his classic shallow space using flat, saturated gouache colors. Like most of his other series, Lawrence probably created "Harlem" through a systematic approach -- thinking of the sequence as a whole piece, making preparatory drawings on each sheet, and executing all the panels at once. He frequently started with the black areas and worked slowly from darker to lighter values.