AMERICAN STRUGGLE: TEENS RESPOND TO JACOB LAWRENCE

“An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives.” - Kirkus Reviews

9781644420218
Publication date: 01/21/2020
$19.95
Hardcover

168 pages
Color images throughout
10 x 8.5” (HxW)

In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education challenged the ideology of “separate but equal,” the groundbreaking modern 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 epic work, Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954-56). Lawrence, the most celebrated African American artist of the period, originally conceived of the series as sixty 12-by-16 inch tempera paintings, spanning subjects from European colonization to World War I. He imagined the panels as history you could hold in your hands, and intended to reproduce the images in a book that was never realized. Ultimately, he produced thirty panels depicting signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and featuring the words and actions of Founding Fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. 

Organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where it debuted in winter 2020, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle unites these vivid panels for the first time in more than half a century. After its run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York (August 29-November 1, 2020), the exhibition travels to the Birmingham Museum of Art, in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, in Washington, and the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C.

In the spirit of Lawrence’s project, this illustrated publication features brief interpretive texts by forty-two singular young adults expressing how Lawrence and his panels speak to them on a personal, emotional level. The writers represent a diversity of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events in 1950s America, these young adults respond to the Struggle panels to share their experiences in today’s America.

REVIEWS

“A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence's art: through the perspective of teens of color.Created in cooperation with seven art institutions, including the Peabody Essex Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this anthology features teen-authored prose and poetry responses to Lawrence's 30-panel visual narrative, Struggle: From the History of the American People. Some pieces articulate what teens see in the art; in others, the art inspires reflections about their lives. All address the difficulties of growing up minoritized in the U.S. Sixteen-year-old Lucia Santos discusses apathy's pervasiveness: "We move forward, convincing ourselves that we are progressing, when in reality we are leaving power in the same places." High school sophomore Yoilett Ramos Sanchez writes that marginalized people give white people what they want when they fight and kill each other, asking, "If white people turned on each other…would everyone be equal?" Arguably the strongest writer in the volume, 2017 New York City Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador L'hussen De Kolia Touré, pairs his analysis of the difficulties of attempting to embrace his queer and black identities with Lawrence's image of a lone cannon. The volume includes all of the Struggle paintings, their original captions, and a brief commentary on each.An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives.” - Kirkus Reviews