AMERICAN STRUGGLE

A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence’s art: through the perspective of teens of color.

Created in cooperation with seven art institutions, including the Peabody Essex Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this anthology features teen-authored prose and poetry responses to Lawrence’s 30-panel visual narrative, Struggle: From the History of the American People. Some pieces articulate what teens see in the art; in others, the art inspires reflections about their lives. All address the difficulties of growing up minoritized in the U.S. Sixteen-year-old Lucia Santos discusses apathy’s pervasiveness: “We move forward, convincing ourselves that we are progressing, when in reality we are leaving power in the same places.” High school sophomore Yoilett Ramos Sanchez writes that marginalized people give white people what they want when they fight and kill each other, asking, “If white people turned on each other…would everyone be equal?” Arguably the strongest writer in the volume, 2017 New York City Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador L’hussen De Kolia Touré, pairs his analysis of the difficulties of attempting to embrace his queer and black identities with Lawrence’s image of a lone cannon. The volume includes all of the Struggle paintings, their original captions, and a brief commentary on each.

An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence’s relevance to their own lives.