Contact with artists or people in the arts is part of your education, part of your development. You may not even realize it at the time how important this is.
—Jacob Lawrence, 1968



Lawrence Scholars working on a still life in their Pre-College Academy Painting course.
Jacob Lawrence's life-long commitment to education was evident both in the classroom and in his art. As early as 1941, Lawrence visited public schools with his paintings, talking with students about art and American history. For him, his art functioned as a means of educating people about the past, inspiring them in the present, and providing them hope for the future.

As part of their ongoing legacy, Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence provided resources to support several programs that offer unique educational opportunities to aspiring young artists. They also supported documentation and scholarship on established artists.

The Lawrence Scholars Program offers young people from low income families with a strong connection to Harlem an opportunity for pre-college studies and mentoring at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Lawrence Scholars study the life and work of Jacob Lawrence and develop skills that help prepare them for college and further study in the visual arts.

ArtLOOKS, a program of the Studio Museum in Harlem, provides a safe space for high school students to express themselves creatively through free programs that take place outside of the school environment. It takes aspiring young artists from Harlem schools and other underserved areas in New York City behind the scenes of artmaking and into the studios of contemporary artists for wide-ranging discussion and portfolio reviews.

The Jacob Lawrence Series on American Artists, a series of the University of Washington Press, publishes historical or critical studies of schools of American art, biographies of individual artists, and related studies, with an emphasis on recognized artists whose work has not yet been extensively documented.

The Jacob and Gwen Lawrence Fellowship at Skowhegan, established through the generosity of the Lawrence’s and with the support of the Jacob and Gwen Lawrence Foundation, offers scholarship support for one or more artists to participate annually in Skowhegan’s unique summer residency program for emerging visual artists, located in Maine.