Iconic American painter Jacob Lawrence on exhibit in Norfolk

NORFOLK — The painting shows a market, with women preparing fish, mothers smiling as children play around piles of cattle bones, and sheep and chickens meandering throughout.

Jacob Lawrence used bright yellows, greens and popping reds to depict scenes he witnessed in Nigerian streets — sometimes in a literal take, sometimes figurative — in his trips to Africa in the 1960s. Lawrence created a name for himself for his years of work spotlighting African and African American life, but a focus on his time in Africa is on display at the Chrysler Museum of Art in “Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club.”

The show will be on display through Jan. 8 before opening in February at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Jacob Lawrence’s “Four Sheep,” 1964. (Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art)

“Lawrence was really, pretty much a rock star in his time,” said Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s co-curator. Gant, a former curator at the Chrysler, is now the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Lawrence, who is sometimes categorized as a social realist, was one of the first African American artists to receive national acclaim and international appreciation, and his works have staying power.

“He’s one of the few, I think, African Americans that — for decades — has been really firmly established in the art history canon,” Gant said, “not just in American art, but I think, in art history, generally.”

Lawrence’s popularity endured from the start of his career to its end. The son of Southern migrants, Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917 and moved to Harlem when he was 13. He spent his teenage years among the flourishing influences of the Harlem Renaissance, which had begun in the 1920s.

Lawrence showed an early predilection for art. Although he is too young to be considered a Harlem Renaissance painter, he was mentored by Renaissance artists such as Charles Alston and Augusta Savage.

His paintings illustrated Black lives in mid-20th century America and were often featured in traveling exhibitions and purchased by institutions during his lifetime — the type of veneration that few artists in the Western canon ever lived long enough to see.

As early as the 1930s, Lawrence began producing praised works, many of which focused on history, such as his depictions of Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad. He became the first African American whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

Jacob Lawrence’s brand of modernism depicted aspects of life in Harlem. His first solo exhibit was shown in February 1938 at the Harlem YMCA on 135th Street. Here, in 1945 and in his Coast Guard uniform, he is at an exhibit of his work at Boston’s Institute of Modern Art. This photo was first published by the New York World-Telegram. (Bettmann // Getty Images)

Even the feds were interested, as the Department of State has promoted Lawrence through the Art in Embassies program.

It is the intersection of Lawrence’s work and experiences with other artists from around the globe that ties together the exhibition. Gant and co-curator Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, the curator of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, designed the exhibit to explore three “interrelated moments” in 1960s Nigeria.

Lawrence and his wife, painter Gwendolyn Knight, first traveled to Nigeria in 1962 to present paintings with themes of oppression and triumph. Lawrence believed that Africans could relate to those parts of African American history. He met with artists associated with the famed Mbari Artists and Writers Club, a center and gathering place founded in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1961, and also with writers, poets and contributors to the Black Orpheus magazine, A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature.

Black Orpheus, founded by a German expatriate and first published in 1957, had a purpose: to encourage and discuss contemporary African writing.

Speaking at a Chrysler Museum event recently, Ezeluomba explained that there was already a “very well-developed artistic culture in French-speaking Africa” by the time Lawrence and his wife visited.

But Nigeria, a former British colony, was not French-speaking and did not have as advanced an artistic culture as some of its neighboring countries.

The founders of Black Orpheus intended to establish the journal as an intellectual forum “where creative people from anglophone Africa would also have a platform to document all the creative activities” that were happening, Ezeluomba said.

Chrysler Museum of Art members getting a sneak peak at the museum’s newest exhibition “Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club.” (Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art)

While Lawrence is the headliner of the Chrysler exhibition, he’s far from the only artist represented. The show contains artworks by artists who were either members of or associated with the Mbari Artists and Writers Club or who contributed to the Black Orpheus journal.

First-edition copies of Black Orpheus issues are displayed as works of art on a gallery wall. The exhibition includes a community gallery space with a reading section where visitors can skim the pages and read copies of Black Orpheus, Gant said.