Benny Andrews was born in Plainview, a farming community three miles from Madison, Georgia. One of 10 children, Andrews was the son of sharecroppers and worked in the fields as a youth. Expressing an early interest and talent for drawing, and with the support of his mother, Andrews was able to continue his formal education and was the first of his family to graduate from high school. Disappointed in a lack of opportunities to study art, Andrews joined the United States Air Force and served from 1950-53 in the Korean War, attaining the rank of staff sergeant. With funding from the G.I. Bill, Andrews enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Although he was exposed to the entire breadth and history of art, the southern aesthetic and early experiences lived during The Dust Bowl of the 1930s never left him. A self-described “people’s painter”, Andrews viewed his work as social commentary, and remained focused on figural work even as abstract expressionism became the predominant movement of the 1950s.
In 1958, immediately after completing his degree, Benny Andrews moved to New York City, settling in the Lower East Side where he soon befriended other figurative expressionists, such as Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, and Red Grooms. Fittingly, Andrews also became close friends with the eldest surviving members of the Social Realist movement, notably Raphael Soyer, Joseph Hirsch and Chaim Gross, who were represented by Forum Gallery. In 1962, Bella Fishko invited Andrews to become a member of the gallery and presented his first solo exhibition, which was reviewed favorably in The New York Times. Solo exhibitions for Benny Andrews at Forum Gallery followed in 1964 and 1966.
Not satisfied with only creating art to express his views, Benny Andrews worked tirelessly as an educator, activist and advocate. In 1968, he began teaching at Queens College where he continued until 1997, and joined the college’s SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge), designed to help struggling high school students prepare for college. In 1969, he became a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which protested the exclusion of artists of color from institutional and historical canons and advocated for greater representation. In the early 1970s, Andrews and the BECC established an arts program in the state’s prison system, which later served as a national model across the country.
The 1970s was also the decade that Andrews began working on his Bicentennial Series in response to concerns that the voices of contemporary African Americans would be excluded from the national remembrance, or only included in reference to the history of slavery and oppression. In 1971, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented some of the first completed works of Andrews’ Bicentennial Series and in 1975 the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented a traveling exhibition of the series which went on to exhibit at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists (Dorchester, MA) and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).
From 1982 to 1984, Andrews continued his advocacy as the director of the visual arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts, initiating a project to enable artists to obtain health insurance. In 2002, the Benny Andrews Foundation was established for emerging artists of color to gain greater recognition and to encourage them to donate their work to historically black museums. The foundation later donated over 300 works by Andrews to the United Negro College Fund, to distribute to cultural and educational institutions as the foundation for arts education initiatives.
In 2004, Andrews began a major body of work titled The Migrant Series, intended to represent three significant moments of mass displacement in US history; the routes taken by Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression; the path of Cherokee people forced to march from their Mississippi homeland in 1838; and the New Orleans residents displaced by the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected poorer communities of color. Unfortunately, Benny Andrews died of cancer in 2006, curtailing this monumental effort.
After his death, several solo and memorial exhibitions were organized for Benny Andrews, including at the Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Museum of Contemporary Art (Atlanta, GA), Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Savannah College of Art and Design (GA), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NY), and The Great Hall at Cooper Union (NY), among others. In 2007, the exhibition, Benny Andrews: The John Lewis Series, opened at the Tubman Museum (Macon, GA), which traveled to three venues in the states of North and South Carolina. In 2010, the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation was established to maintain the legacy of Benny Andrews, under the leadership of his wife, the artist Nene Humphrey.
Works by Benny Andrews are represented in the collections of more than 30 museums, including in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA), Columbus Museum of Art (OH), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA), Philadelphia Museum of Art (PA), Saint Louis Art Museum (MO), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), and Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT). Benny Andrews personal and family archive, including manuscripts, sketch books and journals, are held by Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.