tudio. Also in May 1937, he had exhibited six pencil drawings in a group show of the Harlem Artists Guild at the New York Public Library. Other exhibits were done at educational institutions such as Dillard University, in New Orleans, Fisk University, in Nashville, and Brooklyn College in New York. In 1940 he won a prize for his exhibit at the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro at the American Negro Exhibition in Chicago ( Dubois,27).
             The 1920s also saw the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic and cultural awakening within the rapidly growing black community centered in the neighborhood just north of Manhattan's Central Park. Lawrence was to meet most of the major figures in this cultural circle, including Howard University professor Alain Locke, writer and poet Langston Hughes, novelist Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and painters William Johnson and Aaron Douglas. Locke urged black writers and artists to turn to African and folk traditions, a conception used by some to argue for a kind of cultural nationalism and separatism. Meanwhile, however the Great Depression spurred a turn toward broader political struggles on the part of black intellectuals. Langston Hughes and others began to focus on the struggle against racism as part of a universal struggle for social equality. Lawrence's whole body of work places him squarely in this tradition of humanism and social struggle. As one art historian wrote in the catalogue for a major retrospective of Lawrence's work in 1974: "There is something monolithic about Jacob Lawrence and his work, a hard core of undeviating seriousness and commitment to both socia
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