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The Arts Intel Report

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

Mar 5 – May 23, 2021
1300 1st Ave, Seattle, WA 98101, United States

The images in Jacob Lawrence’s midcentury series “The American Struggle” are full of rush and clash, kinetically alive and confrontational. These 30 panels retell the story, in pivotal moments, of the American Revolution and the four decades that followed it—1775 to 1817. Lawrence, one of America’s best-known Black artists, painted his portrait of the nation’s birth spasms during the McCarthy era—a wake-up call, perhaps. The panels haven’t been reunited for 60 years. Now they are. First on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, then at the Met in New York City, the show now comes to the Seattle Art Museum. —L.J.

Jacob Lawrence, from “Struggle,” 1954 © the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: Bob Packert/PEM.