Picturing Places and Spaces

This scene is bristling with action. Two men in the foreground use tools to drill and hammer the boards, and a figure in the back lifts a plank into place. The builders are working in the middle of a city where pedestrians pass by in a rush. With its focus on carpenters who are African American, this print is linked to others Jacob Lawrence created during the 1970s through the 1990s. In Builders No. 3, he includes a variety of tools in the foreground: L-square ruler, box level, saw, hand plane, file, and chisel. Lawrence collected carpentry tools and saw "aesthetic beauty in how the tool emerges from the hand and the hand itself is a beautiful tool." He projects a sense of cooperation among the workers in the arrangement of verticals and horizontals in the composition and a feeling of harmony in the inclusion of other races in this print.

Jacob Lawrence is an African American artist who studied painting at the Harlem Art workshop with Charles Alston and Augusta Savage, 1932 to 1936. He attended the American Artists School in New York from 1937 to 1939, where he received financial support from the Federal Art Project. Lawrence served with the US Marines during World War II. From 1949 to 1950 he spent time in a psychiatric ward, and while there he created the Hillside Hospital series. He taught at Black Mountain College, and a number of other universities including Washington State University in Seattle, where he settled in 1971.

During his career, Lawrence often represented historical figures who faced struggles particularly relevant to African Americans: François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown. His series of sixty paintings titled The Migration Series (1940-41), depicts the post-World War I migration of Black workers of the rural South to the industrial states of the North.