Occupational Therapy No. 2

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City but was brought up in a settlement house in Harlem. This was the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a time of sharply focused social awareness and a burgeoning black consciousness, which nurtured the young Lawrence and opened his eyes to the life around him. He began taking art lessons early, and during the Depression, he worked for the WPA. It was his own background in Harlem and the hard life of black Americans that informed Lawrence’s earliest work. His Migration Series, supported by grants from the Rosenwald Foundation, was an immediate success and brought the twenty-four year-old to national attention. Lawrence continued to work in series – possibly reflecting the oral tradition of the black community – and the individual images, while powerful on their own, have connective strength when viewed as a narrative. Never one to shy away from human suffering, no matter how close to home, Lawrence did Hillside Hospital Series based on his stay at the psychiatric hospital in 1949-50. Occupational Therapy No. 2 is from this series, and while it contains many of the elements of his earlier work – gestures arrested, simple shapes with no modeling, and primary colors – there are also humor and compassion. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)