Imagine discovering that a painting on your wall is a long-lost masterpiece. In two recent cases, the story centers on Jacob Lawrence.Lydia Gordon of the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts is our guide, part of our Canvas series.So, I have never experienced lightning striking twice, but this very much feels like that experience.Jacob Lawrence was the most famous Black artist of the 20th century. The Struggle series for me really solidifies Lawrence's visionary artistic impact.We're working at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement, when American art is really entrenched in abstraction,and he has his own synthesis, his artistic ingenuity and individuality, to tell the stories that are really underrepresented in the history books.Finding missing works of art is incredibly rare.So, panel 16 was discovered because a visitor to the exhibition's installation at the metropolitan museum of art in New Yorkwas standing in the gallery seeing this narrative series and looking at the holes on the wall where the missing panels would have been.And she thought to herself that, gee, I think my neighbor has one of these panels.And it happened to be panel 16, which is incredible because we didn't actually know what it looked like.
