Thursday, April 29 | 6:00 PM
The Ackland Art Museum hosts award-winning poet DeLana R. A. Dameron (author How God Ends Us, winner of the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize) for a public reading of works composed in response to the exhibition Jacob Lawrence and The Legend of John Brown. Funding provided by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Saturday, May 1 | 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Poet DeLana R. A. Dameron will lead a free writing workshop for poets interested in writing poetry in response to art. Reservations required: contact Kyle Fitch at kyle_fitch@unc.edu.

Jacob Lawrence (1917 - 2000) - one of the twentieth century's most renowned African American painters - originally created The Legend of John Brown in 1941 as a series of twenty-two gouache paintings illustrating the life of the famous and controversial nineteenth-century abolitionist. By 1977, the original paintings were in such fragile condition they could not be displayed, and the Detroit Institute of Arts commissioned Lawrence to recreate the series as a portfolio of silkscreen prints. The result was a limited edition portfolio of twenty-two hand-screened prints, one of which was acquired by the Ackland in 2005. The works were printed and published with a poem, John Brown, by Robert Hayden, which was commissioned specifically for the project. This exhibition is the Ackland's first presentation of the series, and coincides with the 150th anniversary of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

Lawrence, who by the age of thirty was already considered by many to be the foremost African American artist in the US, was renowned for his figurative paintings about the lives of significant African Americans, frequently depicting important historical epochs. Though John Brown had been a popular topic for many painters, The Legend of John Brown was the first to explore the topic from an African American perspective and is the only Lawrence series in which the protagonist is a white man.

In The Legend of John Brown, almost every frame focuses on the figure of the gaunt John Brown, depicted in large flat forms, bold diagonals, pure colors, and with an extreme reduction of detail. The cubist style, narrative format, and serial imagery seen in the series is indicative of much of Lawrence's work.

Exhibition-related materials and programs will draw on the expertise of UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members in Art, Afro-American Studies, American Studies, History, and other departments to investigate Lawrence's series.

Public programming for this exhibition was supported by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Promotional support provided by North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC.