Teach about Black Artists Series: Benny Andrews

 

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 - Ogden Museum of Southern Art 
Benny Andrews, Eudora, 1978, Oil and Collage

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: Artist Holding Onto His Roots @ Ogden Museum – ARTS&FOOD® 
 
 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.

SOURCE 

Benny Andrews’s “Portrait of the Portrait Painter” (1987), in which the joy of being both an artist and a subject is palpable. 


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