Builders No. 3
Artwork copyright held by the artist
Artwork Information
Artist:
Jacob Armstead Lawrence
Date:
1974
Media:
Lithograph, 34/150, Pencil-signed
Size:
30" x 23"
Location:
Baird Administration Building (BRD) Rotunda, near stairwell
About the Artist:
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (1917 - 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House. —Wikipedia
Artwork Description:
This lithograph is one of several works addressing the subject of builders that Lawrence undertook from the 1970s on. "For a number of years," he related to one interviewer in 1995, "I've been working on, periodically, the theme of the builders. I like tools. It's not a series, because it's not a narrative form... To me it's a symbol of progress. It's a symbol of hope, on various levels... It's a symbol of...our capacity, the human capacity to build, to not tear down." "Builders III" shares with most of Lawrence's work a quasi-cubist, quasi-expressionist, collage-like style of presentation that simplifies its subject to dynamic essentials, that couches it in the most modern of idioms and yet leaves open the line of ancestry to folk traditions that for so long were the only outlet for African-American expression. —PAFA
Acquisition Information:
Donation from George Peekema, 2009
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