Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews (November 13, 1930 – November 10, 2006) was an African-American artist, activist and educator.

Born in Plainview, Georgia, Andrews earned a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958, and soon after moved to New York. He is known for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material. Andrews helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, 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 group in founding an arts education program in prisons and detention centers.

Andrews taught art at Queens College for three decades, and from 1982 to 1984, served as the director of the Visual Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts. He received many awards, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965–66), the New York State Council on the Arts fellowships (1971–81), and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974–81).

Background Benny Andrews was born into a family of ten on November 13, 1930, in the small community of Plainview, Georgia. His parents, George and Viola (née Perryman), were sharecroppers. His mother and father emphasized the importance of education, religion, and freedom of expression. Andrews' father was a self-taught artist whose drawings and paintings led to renown as the "Dot Man" and a retrospective at the Morris Museum of Art.

Despite his parents' stress on education, they could not afford to let Andrews go to school when they needed his help to pick or plant cotton. He attended Plainview Elementary School, a one-and-a-half room log cabin. Education past the seventh grade was discouraged in the sharecropping community, but Andrews parents allowed him and his siblings to attend high school during the winter months. Unfortunately, Fort Valley College's limited art curriculum made it difficult for him to explore a range of media. He did, however, spend one summer painting murals in Atlanta during this time. In the same year, he painted one of his most notable works, No More Games, which highlighted the plight of black artists and became an icon of his emerging social justice activism in the art world.

In 1966 Andrews began teaching art classes in drawing and painting at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Jewish Community Center in Bayonne, New Jersey, and an arts initiative in the South Bronx.

From 1982 to 1984, Andrews served as the director of visual arts for the National Endowment for the Arts. In this position, he had the chance to advocate for fellowships and grants to go to talented black artists who may otherwise have escaped notice.

Andrews traveled in 2006 to the Gulf Coast to work on an art project with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Art

Benny Andrews was a figural painter in the expressionist style who painted a diverse range of themes of suffering and injustice, including the Holocaust, Native American forced migrations, and Hurricane Katrina. In the 1960s he began to find his own style of painting, which developed parallel to the flourishing collage moment. in Washington, DC; The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana.

During the 1970s, he participated in a community art space called Communications Village operated by printmaker Benjamin Leroy Wigfall in Kingston, NY. Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and he exhibited there.

Reflecting his minimalist style, Andrews said he was not interested in how much he could paint, but how little. He incorporated his sparing use of geometrical forms to convey broader messages about his subjects. Gabriel Tenabe describes his drawing as "delicate, subtle, and intimate... draw(ing) from his past private life in Georgia and his social life in New York." Christian imagery is juxtaposed with sensibilities of humanism to call out false religion, false democracy, sexism, and militarism and their roles in creating a failed society. New York Council for the Arts Fellowship - 1971-1981 MacDowell Fellowships - 1972-1973, 1975-1978 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship - 1974-1981 O'Hara Museum Prize, Tokyo -1976 Bellagio Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation - 1990 Member of the National Academy of Design - 1997 President’s Award to The Benny Andrews Foundation, United Negro College Fund - 2010

Selected Collections

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN