Black History Month + The Jake

Since 1976, the United States has celebrated Black History Month during February. The School of Art + Art History + Design has never done anything special for Black History Month, until now. Scott Lawrimore, Director of the school’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery, proposed that, beginning in 2015, each February the gallery would have exhibits and programs relating to the African diaspora to honor the gallery’s namesake and Black History Month.

Jacob Lawrence was a prolific artist of great renown. In 1941, after painting for over a decade, he was one of the first African American artists to show his work at a major New York City gallery. Among his works during that period was the Migration Series, sixty tempera paintings that were split between the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. An exhibition opening in April 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art reunites the series for the first time in twenty years. It is titled One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works.

Lawrence continued his work and taught art at a number of institutions into the 1960s. In 1970, he came to the University of Washington as a visiting artist and became permanent faculty the following year. He continued to teach until his retirement in 1986. The school named its gallery after Lawrence in 1994, with his blessing. He was known to friends as Jake, and the gallery eventually shared his nickname, becoming known affectionately as The Jake. Lawrence passed away in 2000.

The inaugural exhibition in this new annual program is Post-Speculation/thewayblackmachine created by HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?—a group of artists, writers, composers, academics, filmmakers, and performers from around the world—also known as the YAMS Collective. The members who created this installation essentially camped in the gallery for nearly four days to bring it together for the opening on February 3, 2015. It is a reworking of a 2014 installation at P! in New York, which was partially a response to the police shooting of Michael Brown and the events in Ferguson, MO. Parts of the installation in The Jake will be used by the YAMS Collective in an upcoming exhibition at Witte de With in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

The New Foundation Seattle organized a number of events with the YAMS Collective, some of which continue into March. Check the calendar on their website for more information. The school included one of the YAMS Collective members, Mitch McEwen, in its Critical Issues in Contemporary Art lecture series this year. The video of her lecture may be found here.

Image Credits
upper: Jacob Lawrence in his home studio; photo by Spike Mafford © 1993 www.spikemafford.com
lower: Post-speculation/thewayblackmachine by HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, February 2015; photo by Jueqian Fang

return to February 2015 newsletter