Between words and images: Jacob Lawrence’s linguistic and visual pictures of the Great Migration

• Authors: Ewa Klęczaj-Siara

Abstracts

EN

Having a reputation as a painter of historical subjects, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is particularly recognized for his illustrations of the early twentieth-century African-American migration. His best known series of paintings, The Migration of the Negro (1941), challenges earlier interpretations of Black Americans’ journeys to the North and their everyday lives in the cities. The article explores Lawrence’s visual narratives together with the accompanying textual elements and the ways they present the social, political and cultural implications of the largest ever movement of African-American people across the country. It also considers the series from the perspective of form with a view to reconfiguring the relation between words and images.

Keywords

EN

linguistic versus visual representations of the world; Jacob Lawrence; African-American history; migration; pictures; captions

• Publisher: Akademia Humanistyczno-Ekonomiczna w Łodzi
• Journal: Językoznawstwo
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 10
• Pages: 123-133

Dates

published

2016

Contributors

author

Ewa Klęczaj-Siara

• Uniwersytet Technologiczno-Humanistyczny im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego w Radomiu

References

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• Lawrence J., The Great Migration: An American Story, New York 1993.
• Lemann N., The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, New York 1992.
• Lorensen J., Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence’s: The Migration Series, “African American Review”, Vol. 40, No. 3/2006, Education Resources Information Center, www.eric.ed.gov [accessed 27.01.2016].
• Nikolajeva M., Scott C., How Picturebooks Work, New York 2001.
• Patton S. F., Oxford History of African-American Art, Oxford and New York 1998.
• Rhodes-Pitts S., Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, a Young Artist in Harlem, Illustrated by Ch. Myers, New York 2015.
• Smitherman G., Talkin and Testifyin: the Language of Black America, Boston 1977.
• Trecker J. L., The Great Migration: Art as History in Ralph Ellison and Jacob Lawrence, „Midwest Quarterly”, Vol. 56, Issue 2, 2015, Education Resources Information Center, www.eric.ed.gov [accessed 27.01.2016].
• Wilkerson I., The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, New York 2010.
• Wilkin K., Jacob Lawrence at MOMA, “New Criterion”, Vol. 33, Issue 10/2015, Education Resources Information Center, www.eric.ed.gov [accessed 20.01.2016].

Identifiers

DOI

10.25312/2391-5137.10/2016_123-133

Biblioteka Nauki

2206652