Arts and Culture - Art Focus THE LEGACY Robust and thriving after the Harlem Renaissance, the African American art community supported and inspired legendary artists of the future such as Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. Under the sponsorship of the WPA, art workshops and community art centers were established in several African American urban communities, such as Chicago (Southside Community Art Center) and Harlem (Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center). These art centers employed professionally trained artists to provide instruction to young artists who could not afford formal art lessons. Artists who gained prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, such as Augusta Savage and Aaron Douglas, became devoted teachers of the next generation of African American artists. [Illustration: The Life of Frederick Douglass #21 (1939 - Jacob Lawrence)] Jacob Lawrence (1917 - 2000) Jacob Lawrence, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, was born in 1917 and is best known for his series of narrative paintings depicting important moments in African American history. Lawrence was introduced to art when in his early teens, Lawrence's mother enrolled him in Utopia Children's Center, which provided an after-school art program in Harlem. By the mid-1930s, he was regularly participating in art programs at the Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center where he was exposed to leading African American artists of the time, including Augusta Savage and Charles Alton, the director of the Harlem Art Workshop and, later, professor of art at Howard University. At the community art centers, Lawrence studied African art, Aaron Douglas's paintings and African American history. With the help and encouragement of Augusta Savage, Lawrence secured a scholarship to the American Artists School and later gained employment with the WPA, working as a painter in the easel division. Lawrence began painting in series format in the late 1930s, completing 41 paintings on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the revolutionary who established the Haitian Republic. Other series followed on the lives of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown. The Migration of the Negro, one of his best known series, was completed in 1941. The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, Lawrence continued to paint until his death in 2000. [Illustrations: Migration of the Negro #3 (1941); Migration of the Negro #17 (1941); Migration of the Negro #58 (1941) Norman Lewis (1909 - 1979) Norman Lewis, born in 1909 in New York, was the first major African American abstract expressionist. Lewis, like fellow artist, Jacob Lawrence attended the art workshops in Harlem. At the art centers Lewis studied African art and was introduced to Howard University professor, Alain Locke's ideas about art, which Locke believed, should derive from African themes and aesthetics. However Lewis saw limitations in the New Negro ideals and questioned its effectiveness in expressing his own identity and interests of the African American community. Lewis later moved from abstract figuration to modernism, as exemplified by artists Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. His paintings from this time are devoid of realistic imagery and focused more on conceptual expression, often referring to African American settings and culture. Lewis, always active in the art community, in the 1960s was a founding member of the Spiral Group, a group of African American artists who sought to contribute through their art to the civil rights movement. [Illustration: Yellow Hat (1936)]