Visual Reckoning
Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle at PEM
Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle • Peabody Essex Museum • Salem, MA • pem.org • Through April 26, 2020
The Broadway musical phenomenon Hamilton wasn’t the first artistic treatment to cast a different light on the American Revolution, nor will it likely be the last. Decades before Hamilton, Jacob Lawrence also revisited this period of American history, but through a series of paintings, revealing it as more complicated—and tragic—than most of us were taught in grade school. As Lawrence wrote in 1956, “The part the Negro has played in all these events has been greatly overlooked. I intend to bring it out.”
Lawrence’s Struggle: From the History of the American People, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, comprises 30 surprisingly intimate panels depicting scenes from 1770 to 1817. For Native Americans and for African Americans, the betrayals reach deep into the dark seams of so-called “human progress.” Lawrence’s project was birthed amid the turmoil of the civil rights movement, the series begun in 1954 after five years of research and just as the Supreme Court ruled to end racial segregation in public schools. One of ten historical narratives created by Lawrence over the course of his career, the Struggle series was last seen in its entirety in 1958, and of the collection, only 25 of the 30 individual panels have been recovered—the missing panels are represented by blank frames or photographs.
Jacob Lawrence, …is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? —Patrick Henry, 1775, Panel 1, 1955, from Struggle: From the History of the American People, 1954–56, egg tempera on hardboard. Collection of Harvey and Harvey-Ann Ross. ©The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM.
Painted in egg tempera on board, Lawrence’s aesthetic is one of sharp edges and hard lines, although the series reads as one long question without a clear answer: Why do humans do unto others as they do? Lawrence answers it by revealing the ways humans are equally driven to rise up against that which is being done.
The series begins with an imagined depiction of Patrick Henry in 1775, rallying men to revolt. A crimson wall and bright red drips of paint foretell of a bloody struggle, anger and fear palpable in the faces of those gathered, their fists raised and their eyes searing points of white. These elements return throughout the panels: the stylized imagery with almost no soft lines, the shadows at once sharp and flat—calling to mind shards of glass—created on a nearly two-dimensional plane that only intensifies the otherworldliness of this nation-changing moment.
With a palette of mostly primaries—variations of red, white, blue, and brown—Lawrence reinforces a consistent aesthetic hum with ironically “patriotic” hues. A horse is blue against a brown battlefield, red coats flashing. A woman “mans” a cannon, the only indication of her gender a white head covering in a spare, lifeless battlefield.
But the blood. It is everywhere. Can there be revolution without blood?
The exhibition is made all the more dynamic with the inclusion of work by three contemporary artists who tackle similar themes from yet another perspective, and in a sense, pick up where Lawrence left off.
Hank Willis Thomas quite literally filters the past through the present by recasting archival historical images so we can “see” them anew. Viewers are invited to shine their own cellphone flashlights upon the images to reveal them, shining a light on the human struggles of history— the arrest of an African American woman in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; a wade-in demonstration at a “whites-only” beach in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1964.
In Derrick Adams’s Saints March (2017), videos of sneakered feet with metal “taps” beating to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In” are superimposed over a wallspanning video of the sky from above the clouds. One pair of shoes is soon joined by others, the crescendo of sound mimicking the rain that is sure to fall. The sky moves fast beneath the moving feet, dark clouds and thunder portending the storm to come.
Bethany Collins’s installation Singing America’s History captures the complicated past through a chorus of voices singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” which can be heard throughout the exhibition. Inside the installation, set up as a chapel, backless benches face a glass case holding an open hymnal, standing in as a pulpit. The walls are patterned with the shapes of wildflowers from the American South and variations of the rose, the national flower of the U.S. Through speakers lining the ceiling’s periphery, one finally hears the voices clearly. Stand beneath one speaker and hear a single voice; stand at the center of the space and hear them all.
Julianna Thibodeaux is a writer and art critic based north of Boston. She teaches liberal arts courses at Montserrat College of Art and creative writing courses throughout the North Shore.