Exhibition Catalog | Jacob Lawrence

CAT. 6
Ordeal of Alice
1963
Egg tempera on hardboard
24 × 20 in.
2013.98
8. Patricia Hills, “Jacob Lawrence’s
Paintings during the
Protest Years of the 1960s,”
in Over the Line: The Art and
Life of Jacob Lawrence, ed.
Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle
DuBois (Seattle: University
of Washington Press,
2001), 181.
9. Ibid., 177–81.
10. Ellen Harkins Wheat,
Jacob Lawrence: American
Painter (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1986), 109.
11. Jacob Lawrence and Henry
Louis Gates Jr., “An Interview
with Jacob Lawrence by
Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” MoMA
19 (Spring 1995): 17.
Ordeal of Alice is regarded as Lawrence’s
most forceful painting of the 1960s,
the era in which he engaged most directly with
contemporary racial politics.⁸ A response to continuing
resistance to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that
ended the policy of “separate but equal” schools, this
powerful work presents a young black girl, schoolbooks
in hand, being taunted by a mob the artist
described as “human beings, and yet they are like
animals,” distorted by rage and hate.⁹ Alice’s tortured
body is shot with arrows and her neck appears to be
sliced and broken. Her name makes reference to
the protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, but this Alice is lost in an
ongoing racist nightmare.
During the 1960s, Lawrence also made
portraits of civil rights activists such as Jesse Jackson
and Stokely Carmichael and painted works about
interracial marriage and the physical abuse police
inflicted on African Americans. He also published
illustrations in journals distributed by the activist
groups Freedom Movement and the Methodist Student
Movement.¹⁰ Lawrence’s work from this violent
period gives clear form to his assertion that “the black
artist’s responsibility is to himself, and if we live up
to that responsibility then we are representing the
black community.”¹¹
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