Andrews, Benny

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Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews (born 1930) began his artistic career as an outsider, working in a representational style just as abstract expressionism was gaining popularity. By refusing to yield to artistic trends, Andrews has carved out a long and respected career as a painter and collage artist with works in many major museums and galleries. He is also known for his work as an activist, educator, and philanthropist, paving the way for young individualists to follow in his footsteps.

Parents Encouraged Creative Pursuits

Andrews was born on November 13, 1930, in Madison, Georgia, the second of George and Viola (Perryman) Andrews' ten children. While Andrews' parents were cotton sharecroppers, George was also a self–taught artist and Viola was a writer. Both encouraged their children's creative pursuits, especially drawing and painting. Andrews was not the only member of the clan to gain acclaim for his artistic endeavors. His brother Raymond grew up to be a successful novelist and his father's artwork was also exhibited in the elder Andrews' later years.

Formal education did not come easily to Andrews. He attended a segregated elementary school in a one–and–a–half room log cabin and, as a student at Burney High School, experienced long interruptions in his schooling when his assistance was required on the plantation where his family lived and worked. Even with sporadic attendance, however, Andrews established his artistic talent, and regularly contributed drawings for class projects in biology, geometry, and home economics. He also became active in the local 4–H Club, an agricultural program for youth.

In 1948, after graduating from Burney High, Andrews moved to Atlanta, where he lived at the Butler Street YMCA. The executive director there helped Andrews find a job and provided him with work space when the young artist received a commission to paint a mural for a local café. Later that year, the 4–H Club awarded Andrews a $400 scholarship, to be split evenly over two years, enabling him to attend one of three black state colleges. Andrews entered Fort Valley State College in September 1948 and began working in the art department. His mother and siblings picked scrap cotton to pay the portion of his tuition not covered by the scholarship. The only art class offered at Fort Valley was a one–semester art appreciation course, which Andrews enrolled in six times.

When Andrews' scholarship expired in 1950, he could no longer afford to attend Fort Valley. He enrolled in the United States Air Force, where he served during the Korean War and attained the rank of staff sergeant. Upon his honorable discharge in 1954, Andrews moved to Chicago where he entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began to hone his style. Prior to arriving in Chicago, Andrews had never even visited a museum, and he found the school's rigid emphasis on established artistic forms, especially its championing of the abstract expressionist style, confining. Andrews opted, instead, to work in a representational style, drawing inspiration from such realist painters as Jan Vemeer, Franz Kline, and Edward Hopper, as well as from the jazz clubs he frequented and memories of his rural youth. Soon he began incorporating elements of collage in his work. "I started working in collage because I found oil paint so sophisticated, and I didn't want to lose my sense of rawness," Andrews is quoted as saying in American Visions magazine. "Where I am from, the people are very austere. We have big hands. We have ruddy faces. We wear rough fabrics. We actually used the burlap bagging sacks that seed came in to make our shirts. These are my textures."

Viewed as 'Outsider' Artist

Andrews steadfastly refused to yield to the trends of the times and insisted on creating work that spoke to those outside the art establishment. His work often featured larger–than–life human figures tied to such socially provocative themes as hands–on labor (an early series was based on the Art Institute's janitors), women's strength, and a prison uprising at Attica state prison in New York. "What ever it is I do or do not do in the paintings I paint really are attempts by me to communicate to the 'Folks.' While I could write yards on who the 'Folks' are, just let it suffice to say for this time, they are 'us,' " Andrews wrote in Black Artists on Art. This approach was frowned upon in the academy, however. In a chronology written by Andrews and published in the catalog for his "Bicentennial Series" he notes under the 1954 heading: "Was rejected for every show, organization or club in the Chicago Art Institute. Rejected for the veterans' exhibition when the only requirement to exhibit was to be a veteran." Andrews supported himself during his Art Institute years by illustrating advertisements for local theater companies and album covers for Blue Note and other record labels. He married photographer Mary Ellen Smith in 1957 and earned his BFA in 1958, while never winning the favor of his professors or peers. "I . . . was determined to remain true to what I felt an artist should be, and that was a human being who happened to paint, sculpt, or etch, never giving up his or her right to remain himself. Needless to say, in the eyes of the school, I was a total failure, and I found that very easy to live with—in fact I gained a certain amount of strength from the academics' utter dislike of what I chose to do, which was natural–looking black and white people from all regions of America," he said in World Artists.

Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews moved to New York following Andrews' graduation and their first son, Christopher, was born a week after their arrival. The couple eventually had two more children—another son, Thomas, and a daughter, Julia. Smith took an office job to support the family and Andrews stayed home to paint and take care of the children. He also began to mingle with other rising and established artists, including African American painters Bob Thompson and Jacob Lawrence, whose works exhibited a pointed cultural consciousness. As at the Art Institute, entry into the New York art world proved difficult, but Andrews met with some early successes. In 1959, his works were accepted by the Philadelphia Academy's 159th Bi–Annual Exhibition and the Detroit Institute of Art's 13th Biennial of Painting and Sculpture. The following year he had his first one–man exhibition at the Paul Kessler Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which would become an important supporter of his work.

Andrews' paintings began to sell, and in 1962 he and his family traveled to Mexico for a two–month stay during which Andrews studied the works of Mexican masters. That same year, an exhibit at the newly opened Forum Gallery in New York drew favorable criticism from the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. One–man exhibitions, group shows, sales, and visits to Mexico came more frequently after this time, and in 1966 Andrews accepted a teaching position at New York's New School for Social research. He was growing increasingly concerned about what he saw as the marginalization of African American artists by the mainstream art community, however. In 1968 he participated in "New Voices: 15 New York Artists" at the American Greeting Gallery in New York, the nation's first major exhibition of African American artists (the exhibit was later expanded to 30 artists and traveled nationwide). Despite the widespread attention the exhibit drew, Andrews felt larger, more established institutions were neglecting African American artists. That same year, he participated in protests against the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Artist of the Thirties" exhibit, which included no African American artists.

Founded Activist Organization

The following year, Andrews helped found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) to protest the "Harlem on My Mind" exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the exhibit featured African–American artists, the BECC was concerned that no black historians or scholars had helped organize the show. The coalition convinced the Whitney to launch an exhibition of African American artists, but ultimately disapproved of the way the museum organized the exhibit and launched a boycott. Fifteen of the 75 artists chosen for the show withdrew in sympathy. In 1971, 50 artists participated in a "Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition" at New York's Acts of Art Galleries, and two years later Andrews curated "Blacks: USA: 1973" at the New York Cultural Center.

Andrews joined the faculty of Queens College in New York in 1969 and began writing art criticism, commencing with a 1970 essay for the New York Times titled "On Understanding Black Art." In addition, he launched art programs in prisons and led a volunteer program at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. From 1982 to 1984 he served as visual arts director for the National Endowment for the Arts, where he established additional outreach programs. Andrews realized he had a knack for arts administration, but found the work distracted him from his true mission. "I hated to leave the NEA," Andrews told Joy Hakanson Colby of the Detroit News. "But I couldn't stay with that job and be a painter, too." Andrews and Smith divorced in 1976, and ten years later he married artist Nene Humphrey.

Recognition Grew

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Andrews drew increased recognition for his work, with his paintings and collages appearing in the collections of more than 20 museums across the United States. In 1990, the talent of Andrews' father and his influence on his son was recognized in "Folk: the Art of Benny and George Andrews," a traveling exhibition, which originated at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee. Andrews also began to illustrate children's books, many with themes centering on strong, black women. "The emphasis is on family and love," Andrews told the Detroit News' Colby of the books Sky Sash so Blue, The Hickory Chair and Pictures for Miss Josie.

In the new millennium, Andrews set up the Benny Andrews Foundation to assist young African American artists and institutions dedicated to African American art. The Foundation secures works by prominent African American artists for smaller galleries that cannot afford them and teaches young artists how to prepare portfolios, conduct interviews, and otherwise navigate the art world. "A lot of African American artists don't extend the same kind of help they got to young artists on the way up," Andrews told Colby. "It should be like a relay with the baton being passed along."

As for his own success, Andrews attributed it early on to what he called "craziness," which might be interpreted as a defiance of mainstream pressures. "Hell, I knew when I started back in 1971 with [the painting] Symbols that unless I took an approach that was crazy I'd never do anything worth looking at," he wrote in the catalog accompanying the "Bicentennial Series." "I guess that's the real reward about all of this. When you're this way, crazy I mean, you can not be all the things that most everyone else ends up being."