Lawrence received his early arts training at the Utopia House in Harlem, the easel project of the Works Progress Administration, and the American Artists School in New York. While at Utopia House, he was mentored by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston, who encouraged his unique style, a style which, though in many ways technically limited, was remarkable for its compositional virtuosity.

Foremost among African-American artists for more than six decades, Lawrence often devoted entire series of paintings to a single subject, ranging from contemporary scenes set in supermarkets and Harlem, to historic events, including black migration to America's northern cities and the aftermath of Hiroshima, as well as sagas of heroic figures who symbolize the struggle for emancipation and equality. Among these are John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, the former Haitian slave who liberated his island-nation from French rule in 1795.

Jacob Lawrence credited his early success to Harlem, both to the extraordinary community of painters, musicians, poets and playwrights who befriended him as a teenager, and to the ordinary people with whom he interacted daily. Both groups nourished his talent and stimulated his imagination. "Without the black community in Harlem, I wouldn't have become an artist," he said.

Though the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism as the prevailing aesthetic of the late 1940s and the following decade may have marginalized much of Lawrence’s work during the same time period, his work in such series as “Hospital” and “Theater” is now highly regarded.

The 1960s saw the advent of his "Civil Rights" series, which continued into the 1970s with the famed "Confrontation at the Bridge." In 1971, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught until his retirement in 1983.

In 1968, he began his paintings on the theme of "Builders." In "No. 1," from 1972, nails lie in front of a formidable carpenter like jewels before a king, silky and softly shadowed in piles of blues, gray and gold. "The 'Builders' are a symbol of uplift for me," he said. "I keep coming back to them."

Jacob Lawrence was the first African-American artist to be represented by a major New York gallery and one of the first to have a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modem Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Lawrence's work in 1974. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. Among the many other awards he has received are the National Medal of Arts (1990) and honorary doctorates from Yale (1986) and Harvard (1995).

In 1941, Lawrence married Gwendolyn Knight, a Barbados painter. They remained married until his death on June 9, 2000, at the age of eighty-two.