Episode Details

In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection were so deadlocked over a 60-panel painting series that they split it down the middle, one taking the even panels and the other the odd. The artist was 23-year-old Jacob Lawrence, a high school dropout trained entirely by mentors in Depression-era Harlem. This episode traces how he became one of the 20th century's most vital visual storytellers.

From foster care in Philadelphia and crayon copies of carpet patterns at the Utopia Children's Center to the Migration Series, an integrated Coast Guard ship, a psychiatric hospital, a politically inconvenient history series, and a mosaic in the Times Square subway, the hosts follow his commitment to clarity, strength, and universality.

• Mentorship from Augusta Savage and Charles Alston, the WPA, and the bright colors Harlem residents used against the gray of the Depression
• The assembly-line method: laying out all 60 tempera panels and applying one color across the entire series before mixing the next, with help from his wife Gwendolyn Knight
• Service aboard the USCGC Sea Cloud, the first racially integrated crew in the U.S. armed forces, and the 48 wartime paintings that were lost
• The 1949 hospital stay and the Hospital Series, and why the Struggle series was broken up and scattered during the McCarthy era
• Children's books, the Howard University mural, the Times Square mosaic, and the missing Struggle panels still turning up in 2017, 2020, and 2021