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Haiti to Harlem: Toussaint L'Ouverture & Jacob Lawrence Main Menu Jacob Lawrence: The Storyteller Paintings to Prints The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture in Print Contextualizing The Prints Curating the Exhibition Imprints and Impact Highlights the impact of the Jacob Lawrence prints in relation to both Lawrence's life and the history of global POC liberation. About the Curators Meet the Fall 2024 Curatorial Class! Select Bibliography

The Ballad of Margie Polite

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Harlem Driven by the Great Migration (1916–1970), the Black American diaspora united brilliant minds, transforming Harlem into a hub of creativity and solidarity amid systemic discrimination. This period fueled a powerful Black art movement focused on resistance, community, and hope, known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Established in 1925, the Schomburg Collection at the 135th Street Branch Library became a cornerstone in educating Harlemites on Black history from around the world. Artists like Langston Hughes and Augusta Savage drew inspiration from this collection, weaving global Black narratives into their work. As the first Black republic born from a successful slave revolution, Haiti resonated deeply with Harlem artists as a model of resilience and pride. Jacob Lawrence’s series on the Haitian Revolution reflects this connection, engaging Black American experiences in a broader global dialogue on anti-colonialism and racial justice. Similar to the raw horror depicted in his Hiroshima series and his illustrations for Langston Hughes’s poetry book, One-Way Ticket, Jacob Lawrence’s original 41 paintings portraying Toussaint L’Ouverture’s life vividly illustrate the defeats and violence endured by enslaved people. However, in his print series, he notably omitted images of this brutality, opting instead to create an uplifting representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s legacy.