As a young artist working in Harlem during the 1930s, Jacob Lawrence was inspired by the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that celebrated African-American music, literature, poetry, and art. The movement called upon visual artists to express and interpret the dignity of African-American lives and of African heritage, following the post-Civil War period in which depictions of African-Americans were frequently derogatory. Infused with these ideas, Lawrence painted works in series that portrayed historic and contemporary struggles of African-Americans, emphasizing their heroism and determination.
When he moved to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington in 1971, Lawrence began to concentrate his art more intensely on builders, a subject he had explored off and on since the 1940s. In this body of work, Lawrence embraced the human aspiration that people can build a better society, and that the same creative energy that animates art or carpentry can animate social change.
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