Jacob Lawrence
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40 free Jacob Lawrence trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jacob Lawrence was barely out of his teens when he began turning history into pictures. Working in Harlem workshops during the 1930s, he learned to tell long stories in sequences of small, boldly colored panels, and by his early twenties the Migration Series had made him one of the best-known painters in America. This quiz gathers the fun facts people look for about him: where he grew up, who taught him, the freedom fighters whose lives he painted, how his most famous series was made and sold, what he did during the Second World War, and the murals, books and honors of his later career. It suits students working on a school project, teachers planning a lesson on African American history, and anyone who has stood in front of his paintings and wanted to know the story behind them. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Two museums bought Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series in 1942 and divided its panels between them by which rule?
Odd and even numbers
Odd and even numbers settled it: the Phillips Collection in Washington took the odd panels and New York's Museum of Modern Art the rest, so the full story is seen only when one lends to the other.
Q 02As a boy, Jacob Lawrence drew his first crayon patterns by copying which furnishings in his mother's Harlem home?
Carpets
Carpets gave him his first lessons in pattern, and he later said the bright colors people of his mother's generation used at home made him think of Matisse.
Q 03Jacob Lawrence's 1947 painting The Builders was bought at auction in 2007 for $2.5 million to hang in which building?
The White House
The White House hung it in the Green Room, one of three state parlors used for small receptions and teas; its historical association paid for the picture.
Q 04Drafted in 1943, Jacob Lawrence joined a racially integrated crew aboard the Sea Cloud in which US military service?
Coast Guard
Coast Guard duty did not stop him painting: he recorded life aboard ship as a combat artist, and most of those wartime pictures have since gone missing.
Q 05Jacob Lawrence's 31-panel series and 1968 children's book both tell the life of which woman born enslaved in Maryland?
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman's story became his picture book Harriet and the Promised Land, listed among the best illustrated books of 1968.
Q 06Jacob Lawrence's last public work, the glass mosaic New York in Transit, went up in 2001 in which subway station?
Times Square
Times Square riders pass the mural on a mezzanine; made of Murano glass, it was installed more than a year after his death.
Q 07Jacob Lawrence's print of five Black runners, a nod to Jesse Owens, was made for the 1972 Olympics in which city?
Munich
Munich's Games commissioned the silkscreen through Edition Olympia; its sprinters recall the victories Owens won in Berlin in 1936.
Q 08For a 1970 children's book from Windmill Books, Jacob Lawrence illustrated 18 stories from which classic collection?
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables suited an artist who liked a story with a point; a later University of Washington Press edition restored five drawings the first had left out, making 23 tales.
Q 09Jacob Lawrence was born in 1917 in which New Jersey seaside resort, where his parents had moved from the rural South?
Atlantic City
Atlantic City was only a first stop: the family moved on to Pennsylvania, and he reached Harlem at 13, the place that would fill his paintings.
Q 10In 1930s Harlem, the young Jacob Lawrence became a regular at which music hall on 125th Street?
Apollo Theater
Apollo Theater bills of the day ran from comedians such as Moms Mabley to Billie Holiday and the Count Basie Orchestra.
Q 11Jacob Lawrence painted a 32-panel life of which abolitionist, whose name was on his Harlem junior high school?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass got 32 panels in 1939, later shown at the Library of Congress to mark 75 years of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Q 12In 1971 Jacob Lawrence and his wife left New York for which Pacific Northwest city, where he became an art professor?
Seattle
Seattle remained home for the rest of his life: he taught at the University of Washington, whose art gallery now carries his name.
Q 13Jacob Lawrence drew the illustrations for One-Way Ticket, a book of poems by which writer of the Harlem Renaissance?
Langston Hughes
Q 21In 1970 Jacob Lawrence became the first visual artist to receive which award, the highest honor of the NAACP?
Spingarn Medal
Spingarn Medal history began in 1915 with a biologist, Ernest E. Just; it took 55 years for the gold medal to go to a painter.
Q 22Which honor, created by Congress in 1984, did George H. W. Bush present to Jacob Lawrence in 1990?
National Medal of Arts
National Medal of Arts winners are chosen by the president from a list of recommendations; it is the highest honor the US government gives to artists.
Q 23In 1946 the painter Josef Albers invited Jacob Lawrence to teach a summer session at which experimental school?
Black Mountain College
Langston Hughes was one of the writers who gathered at 306, the Harlem studio where the young painter rented a corner to work.
Q 14How many panels make up Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, which he painted all at once when he was 23?
60
60 panels were laid out together and painted one color at a time, so the tones match from the first scene to the last; each has its own caption.
Q 15Jacob Lawrence painted the Migration Series in which fast-drying paint, mixing his own from dry pigments?
Tempera
Tempera dries so quickly that he planned every panel in advance; his was bound with casein, a protein that comes from milk.
Q 16Which Barbados-born painter married Jacob Lawrence in 1941 and helped prepare the panels for his Migration Series?
Gwendolyn Knight
Gwendolyn Knight also helped write the captions; they stayed married until his death, and her own first retrospective came when she was nearly 90.
Q 17Which Harlem sculptor and teacher won the young Jacob Lawrence a paid place on the WPA Federal Art Project?
Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage ran the Harlem Community Art Center; for 18 months her protégé handed in two paintings every six weeks for a government wage.
Q 18Which Harlem painter taught the young Jacob Lawrence in an after-school program and later rented him studio space?
Charles Alston
Charles Alston wrote in 1938 that his pupil had escaped the imprint of academic ideas and stood for a new, socially conscious generation of artists.
Q 19Jacob Lawrence was 21 when his first major series, 41 paintings, told the life of which Haitian revolutionary leader?
Toussaint L'Ouverture
Toussaint L'Ouverture's series filled a room of its own at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939, an early taste of the acclaim to come.
Q 20Which abolitionist, hanged in Virginia in 1859, is the subject of 22 paintings Jacob Lawrence made in New Orleans?
John Brown
John Brown's panels grew too fragile to display, so in 1977 the artist remade the whole series as a portfolio of silkscreen prints.
Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, had begun to integrate only a few years earlier; it was the first of his many teaching posts.
Q 24Which business magazine printed 26 panels of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series in its November 1941 issue?
Fortune
Fortune came back to him in 1947, when Walker Evans commissioned ten paintings of Black life in the South.
Q 25Asked in 1983 to illustrate a new edition of any book he liked, Jacob Lawrence chose which 1946 work by John Hersey?
Hiroshima
Hiroshima follows survivors of the atomic bomb, and his eight screen prints show them in abstract form at the moment of the blast.
Q 26Jacob Lawrence's mural Events in the Life of Harold Washington is in the main public library of which city?
Chicago
Chicago elected Harold Washington as its first Black mayor in 1983, and the central library that opened four years after his death bears his name.
Q 27In 1949 Jacob Lawrence checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, staying for months, to be treated for what?
Depression
Depression did not stop the work: he painted fellow patients and hospital routines, pictures now known as the Hospital Series.
Q 28Jacob Lawrence spent eight months of 1964 teaching and painting in which West African country?
Nigeria
Nigeria drew him back after a first visit with a touring exhibition; he wanted his paintings to show the influence of the great African artistic tradition.
Q 29Before joining his mother in Harlem at 13, Jacob Lawrence lived in foster homes in which Pennsylvania city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was where the three children stayed while their mother went ahead to New York; she sent for them in 1930.
Q 30Panel 1 of Jacob Lawrence's Struggle series takes its title from a 1775 speech by which Virginia orator?
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry's words open a 30-panel history of the young republic, and many of its pictures carry a quotation from the period in place of a plain title.