While publications offer documentation, scholarship, and understanding, it is art museums that offer us physical contexts for directly encountering, and understanding, reinterpreting, and finally integrating into our own lives the work of artists - past and present. Museum Creativity applications in FY 2001 reflected this important mission and responsibility. Of those, several were important retrospectives that will offer a look at the development of the artist's language, showing breadth and depth of their contributions to art and society. The retrospective honors the growth and development of an artist, while allowing viewers to participate directly in the impulses and gestures that culminate in mature work or simply stand forever as independent ideas and forms. Perhaps more importantly, as viewers we are allowed a look at an artist's life's work, a human philosophical inquiry that requires our full attention.
Retrospectives quietly pose questions about the meaning and expression of a life's work.
In the face of objects that make meaning of experience, audiences see patterns of expression in the unique visual languages of each artist. That sustained absorption in life work is a particular gift that artists have to share with others through these exhibitions. The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, the first retrospective to fully examine the dynamic evolution of Lawrence's style, technique, and methods. Jacob Lawrence occupies a significant, if solitary, place in the history of twentieth century art. He has worked against a tide that, for his generation, turned overwhelmingly in favor of non-objective art after 1945.