Jacob Lawrence

This photograph depicts Lawrence the year after he stopped working on the Struggle series. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the artist moved to Philadelphia as a teenager, before settling with his mother and siblings in Harlem. By the time of Waintrob’s photograph, Lawrence was living in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife, fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. To conduct research for the Struggle series, he took the A train to Manhattan to visit the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, a resource he used to develop previous projects. Lawrence began teaching in 1958 at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he served on the faculty until 1970. The couple relocated in 1971 to Seattle for a new position at the University of Washington, at which Lawrence taught until his retirement in 1983.