Exhibition Catalog | Jacob Lawrence
Explore a gift of drawings, prints, and paintings by African American modernist Jacob Lawrence addressing Black history and civil rights, public life, faith, and creativity.
Explore a gift of drawings, prints, and paintings by African American modernist Jacob Lawrence addressing Black history and civil rights, public life, faith, and creativity.
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CAT. 9<br />
The Last Journey<br />
1967<br />
No. 17 from the series Harriet and<br />
the Promised Land, 1967<br />
Gouache, tempera, and graphite<br />
on paper<br />
15⁄ × 26¾ in.<br />
2013.100<br />
The story of Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist<br />
who spied for the Union army<br />
during the Civil War and used the Underground<br />
Railroad to transport hundreds of slaves to freedom,<br />
resonated strongly during the American civil rights<br />
movement. Knowing that “the Negro woman has<br />
never been included in American history,” <strong>Lawrence</strong><br />
told her story twice: in a thirty-one-panel series he<br />
completed in 1940 and in the seventeen paintings<br />
he created to illustrate Harriet and the Promised Land,<br />
a children’s book published by Windmill Books in<br />
1968.¹³ The Last Journey shows Harriet in a red cloak,<br />
driving a wagon from America to Canada, where she<br />
and her passengers could be free; the two shades of<br />
green on the ground suggest the border separating<br />
the two nations.<br />
13. Oral history interview<br />
with <strong>Jacob</strong> <strong>Lawrence</strong>, Oct. 26,<br />
1968, Archives of American<br />
Art, Smithsonian Institution.<br />
75
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