Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews, 1930 – 2006, was born in Madison, Georgia, a rural town about sixty miles east of Atlanta.  A Master Painter to his peers. Dignity, simplicity, and scarcity-depression-era legacies-shaped his psyche and later, his art. George Andrews, his father, painted Lindbergh-like airplanes on barn sides when he and the family were not picking cotton. As a child he drew the class’s art projects.  In 1948, the first sharecropper’s child in the community to attend high school, he became the art editor of Burney Street High School’s first yearbook.  His teacher prophesied that Andrews would “tour Switzerland, Belgium and France after completing the best picture of the year.”

Upon leaving High School, Andrews attended and graduated from The School of Art Institute of Chicago, haven to legions of black artists such as Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Richmond Barthes, William Edouard Scott. Margaret Taylor Burroughs, and Eldzier Cortor. Famed sculptor Richard Hunt was a fellow student.  Shabbily dressed, Andrews roamed Chicago looking for Art, prompting a teacher to remark that he would be one of the few students to actually become an artist.

Bachelor of fine Arts degree in hand, he move to New York in 1958 and worked at making his voice into art for 2 years, thus achieving his first one-person show in 1960, at the Paul Kessler Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His mule hide figuration, for decades out of sync with arbiters of modern art, has forged a new aesthetic in the 1990’s.  At times branded “apologetic figurative,” black art,” even “anti-art,” it has always been quintessentially American and can be seen in the permanent collections of some of this country’s greatest institutions, such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum of Art among others.