National Library Week: Jacob Lawrence

Established in 1958, National Library Week has been sponsored by the American Library Association. It now has international recognition. National Library Week was started to encourage the support and use of the valuable institution that is the library. April 8 is National Library Workers Appreciation Day, which is probably more important than it has ever been.

National Library Week 6–12 April: Art by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000, United States)

National Library Week includes National Library Workers Appreciation Day on 8 April.

Jacob Lawrence, The Libraries are Appreciated, #28 from The Harlem Series, 1943. Opaque watercolor over graphite on paper, 37.5 x 54.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2025 Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (PMA-9041lwars)

While taking classes after school in art at the Harlem Community Center, Lawrence often walked 60 blocks to visit the Metropolitan Museum and see art first hand. That did not give him a sense of his African heritage, however. Most of what he learned about African and African American art, and African American history, he learned in libraries, as these were not taught in the public schools.

This work depicts the 124th Street New York Public Library branch in Harlem, which Lawrence visited frequently, and which was a vital source of learning for the neighborhood. His research into his background provided a rich variety of subject matter for his painting. It was the 28th image in a group of 30 paintings called The Harlem Series. The Libraries Are Appreciated reflects the same style in which Lawrence produced his Migration of the Negro Series. The palette is limited to mostly primary and secondary colors. Figures and objects are composed of color shapes with no indication of shading or volume. He applied individual colors throughout the painting at one time in order to assure a balanced composition, while a strong sense of diagonal, vertical and horizontal emphasis in the shapes creates a lively, decorative surface.

Right before World War I (1914–1918), there was a great migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North. Black people looked to big cities in the North in the hope of a better life well into the 1960s. In cities such as New York and Chicago, the black populations increased dramatically between 1918 and 1925. Cohesive African American communities formed within the cities. The greater job opportunities made them feel generally more optimistic about participating more fully in American life. During the 1920s, a significant number of artists were brought together within these large and varied African American communities, something that could not have happened in the rural South. One of the most vital African American communities was in the Harlem section of New York. The cultural flourishing is known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence and his family moved to Harlem when he was twelve years old. His mother enrolled him in after school art programs where he discovered a love of drawing and painting. His earliest drawings were copies in crayon and color pencil of the patterns he saw in rugs from the Middle East which he then filled in with color. This technique of establishing a shape and filling it in with color impacted his mature painting technique.

In the 1930s, Lawrence began painting scenes of life in Harlem. Meeting other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, he learned to appreciate the importance of promoting African American culture and its unique place in American cultural history through art. He made a name for himself for the first time in 1939 when he exhibited his series of panels on the life of Haitian general Toussaint l’Ouverture. The famous Migration of the Negro series followed to critical acclaim.

Lawrence’s personal style was more or less unaffected by other painting styles such as abstraction, Social Realism, Expressionism, or Impressionism. He attributed his interest in color, shapes, and overall pattern to his early copies of Middle Eastern rugs. Lawrence's style changed little through his career except to become a more complex. He applied one color at a time to the whole work, in that way providing unity through color balance. The technique also created an active and decorative surface.