In the first unit writing, I chose The Migration Series as the artifact to write about. It is a series of sixty paintings by Jacob Lawrence on the migration of African Americans from north to south during and after World War One. Next to each of the panels, Jacob Lawrence included a title or a short caption that briefly explains what that certain panel is illustrating. For example, some panels have short captions that says “They were very poor” and “Food has doubled in price because of the war”. Jacob Lawrence used a lot of pathos throughout the series for the audiences to better understand the message he is trying to bring forth.

The themes that I would associate with my first unit writing are discrimination and hope. In one of the panels, it showed a white woman and an African American woman separated by a river where their surroundings and the resources available to them due to their race portrayed a big gap between them. Even so, more and more African Americans continue to migrate to the north in hope of living a better life than when they were back in the south. The genre of The Migration Series is history. A trope that is used specifically in this genre is a large group of people traveling along the same path, trying to get to the same destination. Another trope is the setting in which most of the time you can see mountains and trees used as the background.

The Migration Series is a piece of a puzzle, where the other pieces of the puzzle would be of other cultures, and the finished puzzle would be a picture of the diverse society and culture we have today. The experience I had that informed my analysis of Jacob Lawrence’s work is that my parents were also immigrants and it took them a long time to actually settle down in America. Because of this, as a child, I was being taught that I can only rely on myself and that it is necessary for me to work hard now so I would be better off in the future and will not have to go through the difficulties they did.