Third Grade

September 24th, 2016
(An Important Moment in History)

"This weekend, we’ll dedicate the newest American icon on our National Mall—the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s a beautiful building, five stories high and some 70 feet below the ground, situated just across the street from the Washington Monument. And this museum tells a story of America that hasn’t always taken a front seat in our national narrative. As a people, we’ve rightfully passed on the tales of the giants who built this country. But too often, willful or not, we’ve chosen to gloss over or ignore entirely the experience of millions upon millions of others." --President Obama on the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: http://go.wh.gov/NMAAHC

National Museum of African American History & Culture Opens!!

Meet the Artists

(Clockwise): Clementine Hunter, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden

Clementine Hunter

Born about 1886, after the end of the Civil War, Clementine Hunter was the granddaughter of a slave.

Clementine Hunter was born on Hidden Hill Plantation, but Hunter's family eventually moved to Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, LA where she spent a lot of her life picking cotton. She attended school for just 10 days and never learned to read or write. Later, she cooked for the Big House, using her creative spirit to make dolls for the children, as well as quilts, baskets, and lace curtains.

" Telling a Story about life on a Plantation"

The Art of Clementine Hunter

Romare Bearden: Everyday Life in Harlem, NYC

Digital Photo Collage. Genre. Style.

Faith Ringgold: Story Quilts

Faith Ringgold was born October 8, 1930 in Harlem, New York City. She is a Harlem Renaissance artist and was greatly influenced by the fabric she worked with at home with her mother, who was a fashion designer, and has used fabric in many of her artworks.

Ringgold began her artistic career more than 35 years ago and she is best known for her painted story quilts -- art that combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling.

"The Great Migration..." Artist:Jacob Lawrence

"In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, just 23 years old, completed a series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration, the multi-decade mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North that started around 1915...

...Telling history through his art."

According to him, “Having no Negro history makes the Negro people feel inferior to the rest of the world…I didn’t do it just as a historical thing but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today."

Jacob Lawrence, the Migration Series, 1940-41. Panel 3:
“In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry."

Panel 58:

“In the North the Negro had better educational facilities.”

Jacob Lawrence, the Migration Series, 1940-41. Panel 22: “Another of the social causes of the migrants’ leaving was that at times they did not feel safe, or it was not the best thing to be found on the streets late at night...”

“If at times my artworks do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.”
Jacob Lawrence, 1970