30 Facts About Benny Andrews

Benny Andrews was an African-American artist, activist and educator.

Benny Andrews is known for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material.

Benny 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.

Benny Andrews led the group in founding an arts education program in prisons and detention centers.

Benny 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.

Benny Andrews received many awards, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, the New York Council on the Arts fellowships, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Benny Andrews was born into a family of ten on November 13,1930, in the small community of Plainview, Georgia.

Benny 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.

Benny Andrews attended Plainview Elementary School, a one-and-a-half room log cabin.

Education past the seventh grade was discouraged in the sharecropping community, but Benny Andrews parents allowed him and his siblings to attend high school during the winter months.

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

Benny Andrews 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.

Benny Andrews did spend one summer painting murals in Atlanta during this time.

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

Benny Andrews trained in Texas before serving as a staff sergeant in Korea.

Benny Andrews regularly created and sold sketches of Chicago's jazz scene.

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

Benny Andrews received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship for 1965.

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

In 1966 Benny 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.

In 1971, Benny Andrews began teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex.

In 1976, Benny Andrews became the art program director for the Inner City Roundtable of Youths.

Benny Andrews was elected to the colony's board of directors in 1987.

From 1982 to 1984, Benny Andrews served as the director of visual arts for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Benny Andrews traveled in 2006 to the Gulf Coast to work on an art project with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Benny Andrews was a figural painter in the expressionist style who painted a diverse range of themes of suffering and injustice, including the Holocaust, Native American forced migrations, and Hurricane Katrina.

Benny Andrews made prints with the help of printer assistants who had been taught printmaking by Wigfall, and he exhibited there.

Benny Andrews incorporated his sparing use of geometrical forms to convey broader messages about his subjects.

Benny Andrews married Mary Ellen Jones Smith, a photographer, in 1957.

Benny Andrews died of cancer on November 10,2006, at the age of 75.