Jacob Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter; he was married to a fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as “dynamic cubism,” though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.

Lawrence is among the best-known 20th-century African-American painters, a distinction shared with Romare Bearden. Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series made him nationally famous in his twenties. It comprises 60 individual panels illustrating key aspects of the Great African American Migration, which was in full swing as he created the series in 1941. Half of Lawrence’s presentation of this critical story is available at MoMA in New York City and half is available at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.