Builders III

This lithograph is one of several works addressing the subject of builders that Lawrence undertook from the 1970s on. "For a number of years," he related to one interviewer in 1995, "I've been working on, periodically, the theme of the builders. I like tools. It's not a series, because it's not a narrative form... To me it's a symbol of progress. It's a symbol of hope, on various levels... It's a symbol of...our capacity, the human capacity to build, to not tear down." "Builders III" shares with most of Lawrence's work a quasi-cubist, quasi-expressionist, collage-like style of presentation that simplifies its subject to dynamic essentials, that couches it in the most modern of idioms and yet leaves open the line of ancestry to folk traditions that for so long were the only outlet for African-American expression.