"At school--I can't remember which Museum it was, it might have been the Walker--we were at an art museum with a Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence exhibit--it might have been the Walker, or I think it might have been at the [Minneapolis] Institute of Arts--but it was just kind of weird. We had been learning about slavery in those times a lot, and it was just a whole bunch of--they painted storyline pictures.
Jacob Lawrence SHOOTING GALLERY
Jacob Lawrence did that because he couldn't get it all into one big canvas, so he painted on a bunch of little ones. He painted a story, kind of, with about 22 different paintings. It's pretty incredible because he did it all in two years. His wife, she made a series of paintings. She did them on Harriet Tubman and he did them on Frederick Douglas. She had just about as many pictures as he did, only the few pictures she did--they weren't incorporated into the series--but they took her 20 years for one painting. So he painted quickly, but their quality was both the same. They had different ways of expressing, but Jacob Lawrence, in the Frederick Douglas part, painted a flower in just about every painting as a sign of hope, I think."
