Today at the Museum

Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture

December 6, 2009–May 23, 2010
Focus Gallery II

Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture celebrates the artistry of Jacob Lawrence (1918–2000), an important American painter and printmaker. Lawrence created fifteen dramatic and colorful silkscreen prints based on a series of forty-one paintings entitled The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture that he had completed in 1938. This exhibition will present all fifteen silkscreen prints from the Curtis E. Ransom Collection of African American Art, alongside the Dallas Museum of Art’s painting The Visitors, and a related portrait photograph by Arnold Newman of the artist from the DMA’s collections.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was a leader in the Haitian revolution. Born a slave, he became commander in chief of the revolutionary army in 1800. In 1804, Haiti became the first black Western republic. Toussaint was instrumental in drafting independent Haiti’s first democratic constitution. Through these powerful works about Toussaint and the Haitian revolution, Lawrence presents his vision of humanity’s struggle toward unity and equality.

Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art, and Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art.

Images:

Jacob Lawrence, The Opener, 1997, silkscreen, from the collection of Curtis E. Ransom, © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

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