As part of Arena’s five-year partnership with Step Afrika!, the award-winning dance company is back at the Mead Center this summer with its hallmark production, The Migration: Reflections of Jacob Lawrence. The high-energy dance-theater show uses Lawrence’s famed group of paintings “The Migration Series” as both its artistic inspiration and stunning visual backdrop. Let’s learn more about Jacob Lawrence and his remarkable contribution to visual arts and the larger creative community!

Who was Jacob Lawrence?

Jacob Lawrence, an American painter, was a son of Southern migrants—his father came from South Carolina and his mother from Fredericksburg, Virginia. After his parents separated, Lawrence and his siblings were put into foster care, though he later reunited with his mother in Harlem, New York. Lawrence attended free art classes at Utopia Children’s House which would significantly impact his art inspiration.

‘The Migration Series’

“And the migrants kept coming.” — Jacob Lawrence

Lawrence is known as one of the first researchers to visually document the Great Migration. His inspiration for the ‘The Migration Series’ stemmed from real photos of men, women, and children who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North in the early 1900s. during that time. Whether you’re visiting the series’ odd-numbered panels at Phillips Collection here in D.C. or the even-numbered panels at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you will see Lawrence created the paintings as a moving portrait for generations to understand the human quest for freedom, equality, and opportunity.

“The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence”

“I think stepping is so appropriate for this particular series because it, just like the Great Migration, is a uniquely American experience, rooted here.”

— C. Brian Williams

The collaboration between Step Afrika! and the Phillips Collection began back in 2011 with a chance meeting between C. Brian Williams, the dance company’s Founder and Executive Producer, and Dorthoy Korsinki, the museum’s former Vradenburg Director and CEO. The pair shared similar sentiments about the project. “When we started, we were celebrating something that is truly a folkloric art form and really had not been explored professionally in the country. It was new and innovative,” said Williams. Korsinki elaborated, “Immediately we were sharing exactly the same institutional desires—to make a rich collaboration, interdisciplinary work.”

Williams shares that he hopes audiences will ask themselves: How did they get here? Why would their family—whether their parents or great-great-grandparents—leave their homes and countries? What conditions would force a family to separate, to start over far from everything they’ve ever known?

Come see The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence at Arena Stage running now through July 14!