Sixty tempera paintings on hardboard panels, all painted in the span of a year between 1940 and 1941--that is Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series. Lawrence employed the use of gesso and a loose brush style to achieve the gritty, rough look of his paintings, and limited his palette in order to maintain a sense of continuity and flow, but varied his composition and style to give them some individuality. His painting process, however, remained the same. The following is thirteen panels selected from the series, analyzed with references from the MoMA's (Museum of Modern Art's) digital exhibit. All images in this section have been taken from that website (Further Reading).

Many of the subjects expressed in Lawrence’s art also call to mind the characters of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which I will occasionally bring up to make more familiar connections.