How the undying spirit of Black Americans shone through their sufferings in the form of art:
an examination and curation of pieces by Dominique Nanquil
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47. As the migrant population grew, good housing became scarce. Workers were forced to live in overcrowded and dilapidated tenement houses.
Lawrence arranges the people sleeping here close together, leaving little room for distinction among them. The rest of the room stretches above the sleeping residents, highlighting the emptiness and scarcity of the living quarters. However, the colorful, patterned quilts serve as a reminder of the migrants’ resolve to live on in vibrance, no matter how dull the surroundings. The MoMA draws from an interview with Lawrence in 1992: “We lived in a deep depression. Not only my mother, but the poor people in general. In order to add something to our lives, they decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors … my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance. … It’s only in retrospect that I realized that I was surrounded by art.” This is yet another example of how the spirit of optimism pervaded the oppressing conditions the migrants endured.
49. They found discrimination in the North. It was a different kind.
The invisible hands of Jim Crow followed migrants relentlessly to the North, in forms both tangible and intangible. This panel depicts the blight of segregation in the form of an innocuous yellow divider, separating the white diners from the black diners, echoing the oppression these migrants were so eager to escape. The simple statement, “It was a different kind,” plainly shows that segregation did not end at the North border--it merely transformed into other shapes. The people of the composition, pushed to the edges of the panel, look away from each other and away from the segregating rope, paradoxically making it the center of attention. Robert Pershing faced this sort of discrimination during his trek to his promised land of California, unable to find a lodging that would accept him despite recently returning home from serving as a doctor in the military. Though he had passed the physical border of the South, the true border stretched farther out before him, and he couldn’t even see it.
51. African Americans seeking to find better housing attempted to move into new areas. This resulted in the bombing of their new homes.
The action depicted in this panel is jarring and unlike the other pieces we have seen. The violence here is uncomfortably visible, in contrast with the silent mourning of the lynchings or the disquieting poverty of the tenement families. The plumes of explosions burst from the buildings like volcano eruptions, in multitudes of unnatural colors, drawing the viewer towards them. They burst from the composition, too, breaking apart the linear structure of the urban buildings. Sinister red and blue fire grows at the top of the panel, filling the sky with its smog. Near the base of one of these explosions, a light is seen through the window, implying that there may still be a person inside. Violence in housing areas was far from uncommon; this calls to mind the Cicero Race Riots.