Benny Andrews

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

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.

Andrews managed to graduate from Burney Street High School in Madison, Georgia, in 1948, making him his family's first high school graduate.

He received a two-year scholarship to go to Fort Valley College, a black state college in Georgia, for his work in the local 4-H organization.

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.

Andrews' grades were poor, so when his scholarship ran out, he left college to join the U.S. Air Force.

He trained in Texas before serving as a staff sergeant in Korea.

While serving in the military, Andrews regularly sent his earnings home to support his mother and younger siblings.

Having served from 1950 to July 1954, when he received an honorable discharge, Andrews used the G.I. Bill to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was trained as an abstract expressionist and received his BFA.

Prior to beginning his education at the Art Institute of Chicago, Andrews had never set foot in a museum.

His professor Boris Margo helped Andrews discover his own personalized art style during this time and encouraged Andrews to experiment with combining painting and collage techniques.

While earning his BFA, Andrews also worked as an illustrator for record companies and created advertisements for various Chicago theater companies.

He also regularly created and sold sketches of Chicago's jazz scene.

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.

After graduating from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Andrews moved to New York City in 1958, where he settled on the Lower East Side.

He began working in the Christmas card division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to generate income for his young family.

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.

His work also steadily gained critical attention and was exhibited in several cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Paul Kessler gave Andrews his first solo show in 1960.

In 1962 the New York Times praised his first New York City solo exhibit at the Forum Gallery.

He received many awards, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965–66), the New York Council on the Arts fellowships (1971–81), and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974–81).

He received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship for 1965.

This fellowship was renewed in 1966, and Andrews used the money to return to Georgia.

While in Georgia, Andrews created his Autobiographical Series of paintings.

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.

Then, from 1968 to 1997, he taught at Queens College, City University of New York in the SEEK program, which offered academic support for underserved students.

He then received a CAPS award from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1971.

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 1971, Andrews began teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex.

His arts program for prisons soon became a national model.

Mayor John Lindsey honors Andrews for his work in 1973, and in 1976 Andrews curated an exhibition of work made by prisoners at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

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.