Carpenters

Carpenter is a piece from what has come to be known as Lawrence's Builders Series. In 1971, when Lawrence was invited to be a full time professor at the UW, he found that a change from his life in NYC was a refreshing and much needed change. Inspired by the rapidly growing and racially diverse city of Seattle, Lawrence began to collect tools and compost paintings of workers. Building, to him, stood not just for creating structures, but better lives. It was beautiful to him to see people of all races laboring together to a common end and it became for him a metaphor for a community building a better future together. Often he would include both black and white workers in the compositions, as well as children and families, to symbolize this ideal.