Abstract
ABSTRACTIn the exhibition ‘One-Way Ticket (2015)’, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented African-American artist Jacob Lawrence’s series Migration (1941). However, despite a curatorial intention to do otherwise, MoMA’s exhibition diminished Lawrence as an artist and his Migration series as art by defining Lawrence as an African-American ‘painterly-historian’, rather than an American artist looking to an international art scene. This article examines ‘One-Way Ticket’ and compares Migration with exhibitions of Otto Dix’s 1924 Der Krieg series to demonstrate the racial bias undergirding even an honest attempt to pay homage to an artist outside of a white modernist mainstream. With the acknowledgement of profound differences in impact and scale, this article contends that there is a parallel between MoMA’s ‘One-Way Ticket’ and the consistent assumption of African-American otherness to a white norm undergirding today’s climate of racial unrest.
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