Artwork Description
Jacob Lawrence – Supermarket Flora
Dimensions: 30 x 22″ unframed
Year: 1996
Medium: Color screenprint on Rives BFK paper
Edition: 24/108
SUPERMARKET FLORA is a limited edition color serigraph/screen print hand printed using traditional hand silk-screening methods on archival printmaking paper, Rives BFK, 100% acid free, in an edition size of 108 by the renowned African American artist Jacob Lawrence. Featuring harmonious, matte colors of golden yellow ochre, fresh green, light pastel blue, cerulean blue, red, brown, light and neutral gray, charcoal gray, and black. SUPERMARKET FLORA is an everyday interior portrait scene depicting a black woman fully dressed in blue shopping for flowers in the supermarket. She seems to be smiling as she stands on the right side of the composition taking in the variety of exotic plants and lovely blossoms whose curvilinear forms almost appear to be beckoning to her. SUPERMARKET FLORA presents a fascinating glimpse of an everyday shopping trip expressed by the master American painter and storyteller Jacob Lawrence. The original gouache painting of this image is in the permanent collection of SFMoMA.
Jacob Lawrence’s bold, graphic paintings imbue their African American subjects with vast emotional depth. The artist’s socially engaged, narratively rich works drew on the legacies of Social Realism and Mexican muralism. Inspired by the ethos of the Harlem Renaissance, Lawrence depicted icons of Black liberation such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and he also rendered his mid-century Harlem community at large. His 60-panel “The Migration of the Negro” series (1940–41)—arguably his most famous work—depicts the Depression-era flight of Black southerners to northern states. Lawrence became one of the first Black artists to be represented by a mainstream, downtown New York City gallery. His work belongs in the collections of the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. In 2007, his painting The Builders (1947) was acquired by the White House Collection.