American Struggle: Teen Respond to Jacob Lawrence

Edited by Chul R. Kim Hardcover 168 pages Color images throughout 10 x 8.5” (HxW) ISBN: 9781644420218 In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education challenged the ideology of “separate but equal,” the groundbreaking modern artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his epic work, Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954-56). Lawrence, the most celebrated African American artist of the period, originally conceived of the series as sixty 12-by-16 inch tempera paintings, spanning subjects from European colonization to World War I. He imagined the panels as history you could hold in your hands, and intended to reproduce the images in a book that was never realized. Ultimately, he produced thirty panels depicting signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and featuring the words and actions of Founding Fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. C