2-13-07, 9:32 am

On November 7, 2001, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program unveiled a mammoth tile mosaic by African American artist Jacob Lawrence in the Tunes Square subway station. The mosaic, titled New York in Transit, is a tribute to the people of New York, their diversity, strength, work, leisure and their subway system. The work, finished posthumously with the aid of Lawrence's widow, artist Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, arcs above daily commuters and tourists as a tribute to the life of one of the greatest US artists of the 20th century.

A retrospective exhibit, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, organized by the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, is the most comprehensive exhibit of Lawrence's work ever shown. After a three-month run at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the exhibit will travel to the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Beginning on Sept. 7, 1917 and ending June 9, 2000, Lawrence's life mirrors the tumultuous and dramatic history of the last century. For 70 years, Lawrence documented through his painting the African American experience in the US from the cotton fields to the northern ghettos, from segregation to athletic achievement. His works portray the day-to-day, sometimes brutal existence of working people and capture the essence of their struggle, survival and humanity.

Lawrence's family was part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the slavery and oppression of the South to the industrial North and the different brand of oppression there.

At 13 years of age, Lawrence moved with his family to Harlem, which was beginning what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Lawrence was one of the first artists to be completely trained and developed within the African American community, at the heart of the burgeoning Harlem cultural upsurge.

In a video accompanying the Over the Line show, Lawrence credits the 'street preachers, socialists and Communists' of Harlem in its heyday with his political and social development. Lawrence was an early student of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Art Program Workshop in Harlem. The Harlem of Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and Communist City Councilman Ben Davis is the community that Jacob Lawrence first captured in his bold colors and evocative imagery.

His early works were painted in cheap egg temperas, a medium he learned in the children's workshops of the WPA. The paint gives a bold and bright simplicity to Lawrence's paintings of Harlem life. Children playing in the street, life on the fire escape, ice peddlers and storefronts were the subjects of Lawrence's early work.

By 1938, Lawrence was hired by the WPA and had his first solo art exhibit at the Harlem YMCA at the age of 21.

Perhaps Lawrence's most important early work was the Migration of the Negro series, 60 tempera-painted panels that depict the migration of over one million African Americans north across the Mason-Dixon Line. A descriptive narrative accompanies each panel. This work, first shown in 1941, was a huge critical success, ensuring Lawrence's fame and celebrity in the art world.

Lawrence also created a series of narrative paintings about the lives of abolitionists John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture.

At the age of 24, with purchases of his work by major museums and galleries, Lawrence became the most prominent African American visual artist in the country.

During the 1950s, when the art vogue turned to Abstract Expressionism, Lawrence stuck with figurative subjects but focused on more psychological, surreal and personal themes. The entertainers, musicians and clowns inhabiting Lawrence's work of this period are dark echoes of his brief period of hospitalization for psychiatric treatment.

Lawrence responded to the turmoil of the civil rights struggle with emotional paintings inspired by the dreadful and shocking images seen on the television news at the time. Two Rebels (1963) depicts two Black figures being hauled away by police while the disembodied heads of a crowd of onlookers surrounds them.

Another painting, Ordeal of Alice (1963), uses the metaphors of Alice in Wonderland and St. Sebastian, who was shot with arrows as punishment for his Christian faith. In it he tens the story of the many nameless young girls who braved the racist gauntlets of the time. The white dress and stockings of the Black girl in the painting are stained red with blood from the arrows piercing her, as she stands alone, books in hand, taunted by the exaggerated figures in blue and red surrounding her.

Despite these works, and his fundraising and other support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the key organizations of the civil rights struggle, Lawrence would soon be criticized by Black radicals and the new generation of African American artists who turned to Black nationalism and separatism. But Lawrence at the same time was receiving the barbs of white art critics. His 1967 return to the theme of Harriet Tubman for a children's book was marred by controversy over one of the images of Tubman, gun in hand, pushing a reluctant escaped slave forward.

The book, Harriet and the Promised Land, went on to be named one of the top 10 titles of the year by a panel of artists and librarians, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Public Library gave it the 'Books for Children' award in 1973.

Working people were always at the heart of Lawrence's vision and work. Beginning in the 1940s, Lawrence painted 'builders,' various images of workingmen building cabinets, or engaged in plumbing, construction and carpentry. In the late 1960s, Lawrence returned to this theme with Black and white builders working together in a powerful symbol of integration. In 1966 he also painted the famous image Typists, which shows the busy, communal and claustrophobic world of women's work.

Lawrence would again and again return to the winding flat patterns of the workaday world in his painting. Near the end of his life, he began and left unfinished dozens of 'builders' paintings, each with hands, tools, wood and metal woven together in a maze of color.

'Lawrence aims to tell the story of working people's lives, their work, their struggles against oppression, their small pleasures, and their private moments,' writes Patricia Hills in her essay 'Jacob Lawrence's Paintings during the Protest Years of the 1960's' in the companion volume to the Over the Line exhibit. Very simply, Jacob Lawrence expressed in his paintings the communities, the people and the world around him. --This article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of Political Affairs. Libero Della Piana is a contributing writer to PA.