Between 1910 and 1970, roughly 6 million African-Americans moved from the rural south to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The movement, considered one of the largest in U.S. history, came to be known as The Great Migration. From 1940 to 1941, artist Jacob Lawrence, then 23 years-old, created a series of works depicting Southern blacks moving North. For the first time in 20 years, all of the works will be shown together, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in an exhibition titled “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North.” According to a press release,

Before beginning to paint the Migration Series, Lawrence spent months at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) studying historical documents, books, photographs and journals, and other printed matter. The resulting work moved between scenes of terror and violence and scenes of great intimacy, and gave the visual arts a radically new vision of contemporary black experience. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), with each institution acquiring half of the panels.

In addition to showing this epic work, the museum will also feature contemporaries of Lawrence, such as Billie Holiday, Romare Bearden, Gordon Parks, and Duke Ellington, in order to put the works into historical perspective. MOMA will also be commissioning artwork, poetry, and film, from contemporary artists, as well holding a series of events to coincide with the exhibition.