MLK Day: Community Art Project

Join us at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on MLK Day for a community collage project to celebrate the parallels between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and artist Jacob Lawrence. In collaboration with local printmaking co-op, Paperworkers Local, kids of all ages are invited to participate in a community collage project inspired by two of artist Jacob Lawrence’s panels. This project will take place in collaboration with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute at their annual weekend MLK Festival. Participants will be encouraged to share what they ‘stand for’ and create paper shapes inspired by the prompt, “What Would Jacob Lawrence Paint Today?”

Lawrence was one of the first artists to break through the color line of New York’s segregated art world in the 1950s using his art as activism to amplify underrepresented voices, while Martin Luther King, Jr. worked as a civil rights activist to challenge social constructs and impact policy. These two great men help to lay a foundation for a more inclusive vision of America.

Now on view at the BMA, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle features the series of paintings Struggle . . . From the History of the American People (1954–56) by the iconic American modernist. The exhibition reunites the multi-paneled work for the first time in more than half a century.

One of the greatest narrative artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) painted his Struggle series to show how women and people of color helped shape the founding of our nation. Originally conceived as a series of sixty paintings, spanning subjects from the American Revolution to World War I, Struggle was intended to depict, in the artist’s words, “the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.”