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...ther, to Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. I arrived in New York City's Harlem community in 1930, when I was thirteen years of age. Harlem was crowded with newcomers, but we all settled in somehow. I went to school, and after school I went to an arts-and-crafts program at the Utopia Children's House, which my mother enrolled me in to keep me busy while she was at work. I decided then that I wanted to be an artist. When I first started painting, I was just making designs. The colors and patterns that decorated my mother's apartment influenced my pictures. Later I started painting street scenes. I painted peddlers, parades, fire escapes, apartment houses Ð all that was new to me. Eventually, teachers, friends, even actors on the street corners helped me to understand how my own experiences fit into a much larger story Ð the history of African-Americans in this country. It seemed almost inevitable that I would tell this story in my art. I spent many hours at the Schomburg Library in Harlem reading books about the great migration, and I took notes. Soon my research gave me the images I needed to tell the story of the great migration. Many of the images were new for me Ð along with street scenes, I would now need to paint rural landscapes, images of violence, and interiors, like the inside of a school room. I started the Migration series in 1940, when I was twenty-two years old, and finished it one year later. I can still remember all the panels spread out in my studio on tables made from boards and sawhorses. My wife, Gwen, helped me to prepare the surfaces. I painted the panels all at once, color by color, so they share the same palette. I had made some preparatory sketches that provided me with general outlines, but I worked out the details of the pictures as I painted them. There are sixty panels in the series, and since I wanted them to tell a story, I gave each one a number and painted it ...