September is Library Card Sign-up Month.
Do you have a borrower's card for your local lending library? If not, now is a great time to get one! This library, painted by Jacob Lawrence, is not just a place of study, but a place of wonder too.
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Ticket to Read
September is Library Card Sign-up Month.
Do you have a borrower's card for your local lending library? If not, now is a great time to get one! This library, painted by Jacob Lawrence, is not just a place of study, but a place of wonder too.
Deep in concentration, hunched over books, thirteen figures populate the reading room of a public library. Lying open on the wooden tables, perused intently by the readers, are art books filled with pictures of African tribal sculptures. A fourteenth person clasps a pile of books to her chest like precious objects as she strides eagerly across the room.
Lawrence created a deceptively simple design of the bold horizontal and vertical forms of the three reading tables with their prominent wood grain. Strong accents of blue, red, and green syncopate the rhythms across the picture surface. The tight composition reflects the sense of quiet order yet lively intellectualism that informs this image. Lawrence himself had relied on the public library in Harlem in New York City for the study of his African American heritage, which formed the basis of his art during more than six decades.
If art history is your passion, then visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library.
Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).
Pictured: Jacob Lawrence, 1917–2000, The Library, 1960, tempera on fiberboard, 24 x 29 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.