Label TextIn a bustling nightclub in Harlem, New York, customers drink, laugh, talk, and enjoy music. The flattened figures of the two- and four-footed revelers evoke cut-out collages.
One of the greatest of all American Modernists, African American Jacob Lawrence first gained acclaim at age twenty-three for his Migration Series: sixty paintings, now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection, that tell the story of the great movement of thousands of African Americans from the South to the industrial North in search of economic opportunity. Throughout his career, Lawrence created powerful images of contemporary African American life informed by the bold colors, spatial experimentations, and abstracted forms of international Modernism, as seen in Bar ’n Grill. He also served as an influential art teacher, art historian, curator, and muralist.
(William Keyse Rudolph, 2014)