American Struggle (Hardcover)

"A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence's art: through the perspective of teens of color. . . . An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives." ―Kirkus Reviews

In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of “separate but equal,” the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle . . . from the History of the American People.

Lawrence, the best known black American artist of the 20th century, developed the series of thirty panels, each measuring 12 × 16 inches, over the course of two years. Lawrence created the panels as history you could hold in your hands and intended to reproduce the images in a book that he never realized. The paintings depict signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and feature the words and actions of founding fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. In January 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is mounting the landmark exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. The show, which unites the panels in one place for the first time in nearly half a century, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., on a two-year national tour.

In the spirit of Lawrence’s project, this collection includes brief interpretive texts written by teens in response to the Struggle series. This illustrated book features a chorus of thirty singular young adult voices expressing how Lawrence and his Struggle series speaks to them on a personal, emotional level. The young writers come from a broad variety of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities, and underrepresented voices. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events he saw happening around him in segregation-era America, these young adults use these panels to comment on their experiences in today’s America.

Chul R. Kim is Publisher of Six Foot Press and Principal of Charlotte & Company, a consultancy focused on increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion at arts institutions. He is also a Lecturer at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. He previously served as Associate Publisher of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and as Editor in Chief and Director of Publications of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. He has edited and published children's books on artists Jacob Lawrence, Yayoi Kusama, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, Massimo and Lella Vignelli, Edgar Degas, and more.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was one of the greatest narrative painters in American art history and perhaps the most important African American artist of the twentieth century.

Barbara Earl Thomas is an award-winning writer and visual artist with a career that spans more than 30 years. Her far-ranging exhibits include The Savannah Contemporary Art Museum and the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums with solo exhibits at the Meadows Museum in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Evansville Museum of Art and Technology in Indiana. Her works, widely collected, are included in the Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma Art Museums and private and corporate collections. In 2013, Thomas received the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award and in 2016, the Washington State Governor’s Arts award, the Artist Trust, the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award, and the Seattle Stranger Genius Award for excellence in the arts. She was also nationally noted for her exhibition Heaven On Fire, a major career survey with The Bainbridge Island Art Museum. Her work has been widely featured nationally; with the John Braseth Gallery at the Seattle Art Fair (2016) and at EXPO Chicago (2017, 2018) and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair (2018) with Claire Oliver Gallery (New York), and more. She has published essays on travel, nature, and contemporary arts and culture, as well as monographs on artists such as Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Joe Fedderson, Cappy Thompson, Alan Rohan Crite, and Julie Speidel. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was one of the greatest narrative painters in American art history and perhaps the most important African American artist of the twentieth century.