The Tenement, 1948. The painting is mostly black, in a tall vertical rectangle, with many brightly colored squares strewn throughout it. Unlike his most famous painting, Migrating Birds, his paintings often were predominantly black, incorporating bright colors accented by their dark outline. His paintings were also often tall and vertical, also shown in this painting, and they held a significance relating to social activism, generally targeting the oppression of black people in the mid-1900’s and the conditions of the poor. The Tenement is supposed to represent the tenement houses of the 1940’s, abstractly portraying a tangible social and political issue of the time period.