Lawrence was teaching art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn when he created this painting.

Description
   Having moved to Harlem as a teenager, Lawrence would become the first major artist trained entirely within the neighborhood’s African American community. Throughout his long career he believed art should be a quest for both self and social identity, a notion reflected in this work, one of his liveliest and largest paintings. Teeming with more than forty figures, it depicts the vibrant streetscape at the intersection of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, near where the artist lived at the time.

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   Jacob Lawrence (born 1917) has been a prominent artist since 1941 when, at age 24, he became the first African American to have a work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career, now spanning seven decades, has been devoted to documenting African-American life and history, from everyday scenes to the universal struggle for freedom, social justice, and human dignity. Moving to Harlem as a teenager in 1930, Lawrence was influenced by the artists, writers, and philosophers of the Harlem Renaissance-among them Romare Bearden, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. DuBois-who fostered pride in African-American culture. Lawrence's subjects include the legendary abolitionist heroes Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, and the story of the massive migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrialized, urban North during the early decades of the 20th century. After thorough research, Lawrence chronicles the crucial events of each saga by creating a series of small paintings on paper in a modernist style of flat, brightly-colored forms.

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