Benny Andrews was an artist, educator and activist. He was born in Plainview, GA in 1930. Andrews earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958. Soon after, he moved to New York City, where he would live, work and paint for nearly five decades.
Andrews co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which agitated for greater representation of African American artists and curators in New York’s major art museums in the late 1960s and 70s. He also led the BECC in founding a groundbreaking arts education program in prisons and detention centers. Andrews taught art at Queens College for nearly three thirty years, beginning in the late 1960s. From 1982 through 1984, he served as the Director of the Visual Arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts.
As a student in Chicago, Andrews developed a practice of incorporating collaged fabric and other material into his figurative oil paintings, a technique he would continue throughout his career. In addition to working in oil and mixed-media collage, he made sculptures, prints and drawings. He also illustrated several books written by his brother, the author Raymond Andrews, as well as many children’s books, including a biography of civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis. He continued his prolific output of artwork, which ranged from explorations of history and social justice to intimate depictions of friends and family, until his death in 2006.
Benny Andrews was born in 1930 to a mixed-race family
(Cherokee-Scottish-African American) in rural Plainview, Georgia. After
becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school, he
attended Fort Valley State College supported by a scholarship. He was
not allowed to attend the University of Georgia due to the color of his
skin. In 1954, after serving as a military policeman in the Korean War,
he used the GI Bill to attend the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, studying under Kathleen Blackshear. No longer constrained by
the racial laws of the South, he entered an art museum and saw original
masterworks for the first time in 1954, an experience that brought tears
to his eyes. Benny Andrews rose from the injustices of the Jim Crow
South to become a leading voice in American painting. Drawing from the
Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s premier collection of works by Benny
Andrews, this ongoing exhibition celebrates one of the South’s greatest
voices in the visual arts.
Benny Andrews, Interior with Cat, 1988, Oil and collage
In 2001, after living and working in Manhattan for more than forty
years, Benny Andrews and Nene Humphrey renovated and moved to a new
studio and residential structure in Brooklyn. The primary focus in the
studio during his last years was the “Migrant Series,” inspired by his
reading of writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes as well
as his rediscovery of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Each of
the three major components of this project was planned to reflect one
aspect of his own mixed heritage—he was of African-American,
Scotch-Irish and Cherokee descent—and was to be related to a major
migration in American history, beginning with the Dust Bowl migration to
California, continuing with the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” migration,
and concluding with the Great Migration of African-Americans to the
North.
Grandmother’s Dinner, 1992
In 1962, the Forum Gallery mounted his first New York solo exhibition.
He went on to develop a reputation as a socially-minded artist and an
advocate for greater visibility of African Americans in the art world.
For the next four decades, he made and exhibited work in New York, and
dedicated himself to activism and education in the community.
