Reading about the Renaissance? 7 pieces hang in the salon.
Jazz age works on museum-grade canvas, each hung one at a time on a charcoal wall. The room is open.
Walk the Harlem SalonThe Migration Series is a set of sixty panels Jacob Lawrence painted in 1940 and 1941, a single continuous account of Black families leaving the rural South for Northern cities. He painted all sixty at once, color by color, so the whole series would hold together.
I want to be upfront about something. This piece is not a Jacob Lawrence biography. I'm not going to hand you a birth date, a death date, and a tidy list of everything he ever painted. What I want to do instead is sit with one work, really sit with it, because that one work changed how I think about hanging art in a home.
That work is the Migration Series.
I'll say what I do know, cite where it comes from, and stop there. No guessing at the rest.
What the series is: sixty panels, one story
Between 1940 and 1941, Jacob Lawrence painted sixty tempera panels under the title The Migration of the Negro. Together they tell the story of the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black families out of the rural South and into Northern cities in search of work and safety and a fairer shot at life.
Sixty panels sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But that's the point. A single canvas can hold a moment. Sixty panels can hold a movement, in the literal sense, people crossing state lines, crowding into train cars, arriving in cities that didn't always want them but couldn't run without their labor.
Lawrence didn't paint sixty separate ideas and staple them together. He painted one continuous argument, broken into sixty beats, and every beat pulls the next one forward.
Think about how differently a family photo album reads compared to a single framed portrait. Both are true. Only one of them shows you the arc. Lawrence built the arc on purpose, panel by panel, at a moment when the country badly needed someone to show the whole shape of that migration rather than one snapshot of it.
How it works visually: color as narrative engine
Here's where the piece gets structurally interesting.
Lawrence worked in flat, bold planes of color rather than blended shading or classical modeling. Art historians describe the style as a form of "dynamic cubism," borrowing cubism's fractured geometry and running it through a much more direct, almost poster-like palette. Nothing about it is timid.
That flatness isn't a limitation. It's a decision. Flat color reads fast, at a glance, the way a headline reads faster than a paragraph. String sixty of those fast reads together in sequence and you get something closer to film than to painting: a rhythm, a build, a payoff.
This is the part I keep coming back to as someone who sells art for walls. Sequence is a design tool. One striking panel stops you for a second. Sixty of them, seen in order, move you through time. The eye doesn't just look. It travels.
There's a practical lesson buried in there too. Flat, confident color survives distance and repetition in a way that delicate detail doesn't. Hang one heavily detailed piece and people study it up close. Hang a row of bold, simple color fields and people read the whole wall from across the room before they ever step closer, which is exactly the effect a sequence wall is supposed to produce.
The split: two museums, one story, cut in half
In 1942, the series didn't stay together. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York split the sixty panels between them, dividing the even-numbered and odd-numbered pieces.
Sit with that for a second. One museum holds the odd chapters. The other holds the even ones. Neither institution owns the full story on its own wall, on any given day, in any given city.
I find that genuinely moving, and also a little instructive. A narrative sequence doesn't lose all its power when it's broken up. It loses some. The panels at the Phillips still read as art on their own. But the full sixty, seen together as Lawrence intended, is a different experience than either half alone. Sequence has a completeness that single pieces, however strong, can't fully replace.
The Savage connection: mentorship that outlasted the classroom
Lawrence didn't arrive at this scale of ambition alone. He trained through the Harlem programs run by sculptor Augusta Savage, whose students also included Norman Lewis and Gwendolyn Knight. If you want the fuller picture of what Savage built and who came through her studio doors, I wrote about her separately in our piece on Augusta Savage the sculptor.
A generation of Harlem's most ambitious visual artists trained under one woman's roof. That's not a footnote. That's infrastructure. Savage taught, organized, and fought for studio space and funding, and within a generation her students were producing work that museums split in half just to display it properly. Mentorship paying off doesn't always look glamorous while it's happening. Sometimes it looks like a free art class in a Harlem basement.
For the wider context on the movement both artists came out of, our hub article on Harlem Renaissance visual artists lays out the full network of painters, sculptors, and printmakers working alongside them.
The decor payoff: build your own sequence wall
Here's why this history matters if you're hanging art in a living room and not a museum.
Sequence thinking didn't stay in 1941. It shows up now in diptychs, triptychs, and gallery rows, and every one of those formats is a small-scale descendant of what Lawrence proved: that meaning can live in the relationship between pieces, not just inside any single frame.
A diptych asks two images to have a conversation. A triptych adds a third voice and suddenly you've got a beginning, middle, and end above your sofa. A gallery row, four or five prints marching across a hallway, borrows Lawrence's rhythm most directly of all. One piece, then another, then another, each one pulling your eye to the next.
Building one at home doesn't require sixty panels. It requires a decision about order. Pick a size that repeats (uniform frames read as one thought, mismatched sizes read as clutter). Pick a spacing that repeats too, two to three inches between pieces is a safe, consistent gap. And pick a story, even a loose one: a color that deepens left to right, a mood that shifts from quiet to bold, faces that seem to look toward each other across the wall.
Three pieces is enough to start feeling this. Hang them, live with them for a week, and notice whether your eye moves in the order you planned or wanders off on its own. Adjust the order, not the pieces, and the wall will tell you when it's right.
You're not copying Lawrence. You're borrowing the one idea that made his series work. Put things in order, and the wall starts talking.
If that kind of sequencing sounds like what your own walls need, our Harlem Renaissance artwork pairs naturally into rows and triptychs, and the Melanin wall art pieces carry that same sense of movement and story without needing sixty panels to say it.
Sources
Written by Robert Lawrence, the painter and founder behind Noirci Studio. Atlanta raised, Clark Atlanta trained, painting Black life from memory since 2006. He built the gallery, sets its standard, and still paints. Every article here is held to our editorial guidelines.