Do not underestimate the power of a people who can put together the powers of ownership with the determination to have their voices and images firmly implanted in the fields of the culture they have cultivated.
Benny Andrews, journal entry, January 29, 2003, published in Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013), 4.
“For Benny [Andrews] there was no line where his activism ended and his art began,” wrote civil rights leader John Lewis.1 No matter how great his success or how much time he spent in the New York art world, Andrews never felt removed or elevated from the people he came from.2 The second of ten children, Andrews was born in 1930 in Plainview, Georgia, a rural farming community three miles outside of Madison. His father was a self-taught artist and sharecropper, and his mother was determined he and his siblings would be educated, though sharecropping children conventionally stopped school after seventh grade to work in the fields full time. Throughout his artistic career, Andrews never believed that making art was independent of working toward justice: “I don’t accept that it’s fine art over here on a pedestal, and social stuff is down handing out peanut butter. I see it as much more integrated.”3 Despite the increasing market value of his artwork, Andrews prized “audiences that are not normally reached by the fine art world.”4 He made images for reproduction on widely available calendars and in illustrated children’s books, a 2005 limited edition of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), and his brother Raymond Andrews award-winning first novel, Appalachee Red (1977).
John Lewis, foreword to Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013), 7. ↩︎
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Benny Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back,” in Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013), 11. ↩︎
Benny Andrews, in Stanley J. Staniski, An Interview with Benny Andrews, Staniski Media, Washington, DC, 2003, video, 24:19 minutes, available at bennyandrews.com/about-benny. ↩︎
Benny Andrews, in Stanley J. Staniski, An Interview with Benny Andrews, Staniski Media, Washington, DC, 2003, video, 24:19 minutes, available at bennyandrews.com/about-benny. ↩︎
In his painting Shadow Over the Land (1966), Benny Andrews depicted a watery dreamscape filled with tiny cavorting white nudes, reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1504). A young Black man sits hunched over, larger than his surroundings, solitary, and contemplative. Characteristic of Andrews work, this central figure is expressive and empathetic. Though not explicit portraits, his figures have histories and palpable emotions. As the artist explained of his practice: “Faces talk to me too. I get my painting started and this face is telling me something. . . . I look in the face and I slowly start feeling what this person is supposed to be doing and it guides me.”1
Benny Andrews, in trailer for The Visible Man, L&S Video, posted March 17, 2009, video, 1:00 minute, available at youtube.com/watch?v=umJ0rt3IKbw. ↩︎
The civil rights movement reached the American art world in the late 1960s with the first public demonstrations to integrate museums, demanding representation in exhibitions, acquisitions, and curatorial roles. Artist and curator Howardena Pindell described the art world’s “nepotistic, interlocking system” that restricted access to Black artists and art workers industry wide.1 Until 1967, only a dozen museum exhibitions had featured the work of Black artists with the exception of exhibitions at historically black colleges and universities.2 Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 blockbuster, was no exception; instead of artwork, it displayed mural-sized documentary photographs of street life in Harlem. In response, Benny Andrews cofounded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the museum holding signs asking “Harlem on Whose Mind?”3 The group later protested the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, building coalitions with other organizations to denounce discriminatory hiring and exhibition practices at museums. Such calls rang out across the nation. In 1976 the Santa Clara County Black Caucus, an organization of local citizens, proposed a major exhibition at the San José Museum of Art. Curated by artist Marie Johnson Calloway, the exhibition 20th-Century Black Artists featured twenty nationally and internationally recognized Black artists, including Andrews.4
Susan E. Cahan, introduction to Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. ↩︎
Susan E. Cahan, introduction to Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. ↩︎
Holland Cotter, “What I Learned from a Disgraced Art Show on Harlem,” The New York Times, August 19, 2015. ↩︎
Marie Johnson, 20th Century Black Artists (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 1976). ↩︎
The son of sharecroppers from rural Georgia, Benny Andrews produced work that was deeply informed by his memories of growing up in the segregated South. As he explains, “No words adequately articulate the sharecropper’s reality. It is too demeaning, demoralizing, and dehumanizing to get into a verbal language.”1 Though he spent most of his adult life in New York, he carried these early experiences with him. While at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a student in the mid-1950s, Andrews forged his own way; he rejected its molding of professional artists, selecting instead to frequent Chicago’s jazz clubs and to hang out with the janitors at school.2 Against the school’s emphasis on abstraction, he favored a figuration with which he could lyrically express the reality of people who face injustices of racism, poverty, and war. Andrews developed a technique of incorporating cut fabric—sometimes from clothes worn by his family3—into his compositions, through which he explored surface, texture, and pattern while intertwining personal histories.
Benny Andrews, in Lowery Stokes Sims, “Benny Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back,” in Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013), 11. ↩︎
William Zimmer, “‘I Believe I’m Doing America,’” in Benny Andrews: The American Series, ed. George Rivera (Santa Clara, CA: Triton Museum of Art, 1992), 5–6. ↩︎
Lowery Stokes Sims, “Benny Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back,” in Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013), 9. ↩︎
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