NEW YORK, NY.- Marking the centennial of the beginning of the Great Migration, the multi-decade mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, The Museum of Modern Art presents One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North. The exhibition highlights the ways in which Lawrence and others in his circles developed innovative artistic strategies to offer perspectives on this crucial episode in American history. On view April 3 through September 7, 2015, the exhibition reunites all 60 panels of Lawrence’s Migration Series: it is the first time they have been seen together at MoMA in 20 years. The exhibition includes other accounts of the movement in a broad variety of mediums, including literature, music, photography, sociopolitical writings, and paintings. As an extension of the exhibition, a rich menu of new commissions, public events, performances, film screenings, digital resources, and publications places contemporary artists in conversation with Lawrence’s masterwork and explores the legacy of the Migration on American culture and society. One-Way Ticket is organized by The Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library.

The Migration Series
Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) completed his landmark series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions in 1941, when he was just 23 years old. A child of migrants himself and a resident of Harlem since the age of 13, Lawrence’s views as an artist were shaped by his immersion in heady contemporary debates about an artist’s social responsibilities and about writing—and giving visual form to—African-American history. Lawrence spent months at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) studying historical documents, books, photographs and journals, and other printed matter related to the Great Migration. He worked on the captions first, combing through the notes he had taken from the sources at the Schomburg Center. Once he had decided on the panels’ subjects, he began sketching. The resulting work depicts the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in an epic way: moving between scenes of great intimacy and tenderness and scenes of terror and violence, it gave the visual arts a radically new model for representing black experience in America. The series was shown at Manhattan’s Downtown Gallery in November and December 1941, where Lawrence was the first black artist to be represented by a New York gallery. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of MoMA and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), with each institution acquiring half of the panels.

One-Way Ticket’s central gallery offers visitors a rare chance to see Lawrence’s celebrated series in its entirety—in numbered order and at eye level—and includes other accounts of the movement by Lawrence’s contemporaries in a broad variety of mediums. A gallery devoted to literary representations of the Migration includes novels and poems by writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. Other sections of the exhibition dedicated to music explore the integration of Southern sounds into music performed for Northern audiences and feature video and audio recordings of performances by Marian Anderson, Josh White, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and others. The final section presents a selection of the many visual and textual sources that informed Lawrence’s paintings—works that reported and gave image to the Migration, including photographs by Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, and Robert McNeill; sociological studies by Carter G. Woodson, Charles Johnson, Emmett J. Scott, and Walter White; and political cartoons by Romare Bearden and Charles Alston. Paintings, drawings, and prints by Alston, Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Charles White further emphasize the interest in the Migration among those in Lawrence’s circles as a subject for artistic reflection. They also make clear the Migration’s role as an extraordinary cultural catalyst—producing new forms and genres that would become the music, images, and language of urban America.

The exhibition utilizes digital platforms that allow visitors to page through historical books immediately related to Lawrence’s work. Audio and video recordings of 10 poets reading their contributions to the Migration Series Poetry Suite—newly commissioned works inspired by the Migration Series, selected by acclaimed author Elizabeth Alexander—are presented in the galleries. The poets are Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams, and Kevin Young.

New Commissions, Programs, and Film Exhibition
MoMA has launched a series of new commissions that puts contemporary artists working in a variety of disciplines in conversation with Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. The 10 poems featured in the exhibition’s Migration Poetry Suite also appear in the exhibition’s catalogue and will debut at a live reading on May 1. In a commission by MoMA's Department of Media and Performance Art, Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison considers what it means to encounter Lawrence’s work in a contemporary context with a two-part project that includes an off-site reading group and performances at MoMA on June 25 and 27. WQXR radio host, musicologist, and musician Terrance McKnight presents an evening of improvised music and spoken-word performance on April 23 with a cast of more than twenty celebrated artists. The acclaimed writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and the illustrator Christopher Myers have collaborated to produce a new MoMA-published children’s book inspired by Lawrence’s discovery of art as a child growing up in Harlem in the 1930s. Thom Andersen’s Juke: Passages from the Films of Spencer Williams (2015), a newly commissioned moving-image work by MoMA’s Department of Film, considers the 1930s and 40s films of pioneering African American writer-director Spencer Williams. World premiering on June 1, it opens the exhibition A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration, which presents fiction films by a number of important independent African American writer-directors, as well as nonfiction films that capture African American life during the Great Migration of the 1920s-40s, ranging from newsreels and home movies to New Deal social documentaries.

The exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art is organized by Leah Dickerman, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Jodi Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.