Builders Three

About the Work

Builders Three, a nine-color offset lithograph in an edition of 90 measuring 30 x 22 inches, was part of Jacob A. Lawrence's ongoing series of images on a theme. He had been working with the iconic image of builders in a variety of media since the early 1970s, including gouache, oil, lithography, and screenprint. This was his first time working with offset. This image honors African American workers' contributions to sustaining families and building communities, institutions, and nations. Builders Three shares a quasi-cubist, quasi-expressionist, collage-like presentation style with the majority of Lawrence's work, simplifying its subject to dynamic essentials, couching it in the most modern of idioms while leaving open the line of ancestry to folk traditions that for so long were the only outlet for African American expression. It employs multiple entries of each color through the press to achieve a dense color effect similar to screenprinting, a medium familiar to the artist. "For a number of years," Lawrence related to one interviewer in 1995, "I've been working on, periodically, the theme of the builders. I like tools. It's not a series, because it's not a narrative form...To me it's a symbol of progress. It's a symbol of hope, on various levels...It's a symbol of...our capacity, the human capacity to build, to not tear down."  Lawrence received the 1991 James Van Der Zee Award presented annually by Brandywine to distinguished African American artists. 
_{—Adapted from https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection/item/builders-iii, accessed 6-29-2021
 and "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)}