A traveling exhibition featuring prints created by Jacob Lawrence—one of the first nationally recognized Black artists in U.S. history—opens at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley (MSV) on February 1 and will be on view through August 3, 2025.

Jacob Lawrence: 3 Series of Prints will be on view for the first time in Virginia with its display at the MSV.

“The timing of this exhibition’s opening during Black History Month underscores its significance,” said Nancy Huth, MSV deputy director of arts & education. “Through his work, Jacob Lawrence offers a lens into important chapters of African American history while addressing themes that resonate across cultures and time.”

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was the first African American artist whose work was included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence is known for using vivid colors, dynamic images, and a series format to tell the stories of historical African American figures and the broader human experience.

The MSV exhibition features 31 prints created between 1983 and 1997 from three of Lawrence’s series—Genesis, Hiroshima, and Toussaint L’Ouverture—along with five additional prints depicting civil rights confrontations and daily life.

For the Genesis series, Jacob Lawrence drew on his childhood memories of sermons at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church to illustrate eight passages from the Book of Genesis in the King James Bible. Inspired by survivors’ stories recorded in John Hersey’s 1946 book, Hiroshima, Lawrence’s Hiroshima series highlights the horrors of war by depicting ordinary people caught in the bombing. Lawrence created his Toussaint L’Ouverture prints from 1986 to 1997, reinterpreting works from a series of paintings he completed in 1938 illustrating the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who led Haiti to freedom from European rule.

Along with the series works, the MSV exhibition includes five silkscreen prints illustrating the African American experience, such as Confrontation at the Bridge depicting the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights, and People in Other Rooms of a bustling Harlem street scene.

Exclusive to the MSV presentation, the exhibition features The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, a rare large folio book created by Lawrence and published in 1989 by the Limited Editions Club in New York. One of only 400 copies produced, this book was owned by MSV benefactor Julian Wood Glass Jr. (1910–1992).

Jacob Lawrence: Three Series of Prints is drawn from the collections of Dr. and Mrs. Leon Banks and Alitash Kebede. The exhibition and its national tour were organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California.

The MSV, located at 901 Amherst Street in Winchester, Virginia, is a regional cultural center that includes a galleries building with permanent and rotating exhibitions, the Glen Burnie House, seven acres of formal gardens, and The Trails at the MSV—a free-admission art park open daily from 7 a.m. to dusk. The galleries and Jacob Lawrence: 3 Series of Prints exhibition are open Tuesday through Sunday 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Admission is $10–$15; with free gallery admission to MSV members, ages 12 & under, and—through the Museums for All program—individuals receiving food assistance. Individual and family gallery admission fees are waived on Wednesdays thanks to corporate partner Howard Shockey & Sons (excludes special garden exhibitions & group tours). The gardens and Glen Burnie House reopen on April 1, with hours shifting to 10 a.m.–5 p.m. For more information, visit www.theMSV.org or call 540-662-1473, ext. 235. –END–