Benny Andrews: There Must Be A Heaven
March 19 – May 18, 2013
100 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to
present Benny Andrews: There Must Be A
Heaven, an exhibition of thirty-six works that span from 1964 to 2005.
It is the first comprehensive survey since Andrews’s death in 2006 and the
first solo exhibition of his work at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,
which recently moved to 100 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring an
essay by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and a foreword by Congressman
John Lewis, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (Georgia).
A self-described “people’s painter,” Benny Andrews
(American, 1930-2006) was born in Plainview, Georgia, to a family of
sharecroppers. In 1948, he received a small scholarship to attend college, but
eventually had to drop out. He joined the US Air Force in 1950, served for the
duration of the Korean War, and received an honorable discharge in 1954. With
funding from the GI Bill, Andrews returned to school, enrolling in the Art
Institute of Chicago. In 1958, he received his degree and left Chicago for New
York City.
Settling in a tenement on the Lower East Side, he developed the
“rough collage” technique that became a hallmark of his style. As Sims in her
catalogues essay explains, “Andrews’s use of collage came out of that fact that
he found oil painting ‘too academic’ and imbued with more ‘sophisticated’
associations. He found the textural quality of collage appealing, and he used
it to ‘keep himself off balance.’ . . . Andrews’s work, with its calculated
awkwardness, unconventional techniques, and Southern focus, exists
provocatively alongside that of self-taught artists. But as art historian and
Andrews scholar J. Richard Gruber would caution us, despite Andrews’s
predilection for ‘realistic subject matter, he was intrigued by the fundamental
issues associated with abstract art.’ While he was often in conflict with his
instructors and peers over the emphasis on abstract expressionism at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago . . . he would come to be ‘increasingly more
convinced that all art was fundamentally abstract.’”
By the 1960s, Andrews had mastered this technique and exhibition
opportunities followed. In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney
Fellowship, Andrews traveled to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical
Series. He continued to paint, exhibit, travel, write, and teach until his
death from cancer at age 76. During his lifetime, he lectured extensively and
received numerous fellowships, grants, and other awards from prestigious
international institutions. His work is featured in over thirty permanent
collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art,
High Museum (Atlanta, Georgia), Art Institute of Chicago, Studio Museum of
Harlem, and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC).
Andrews did not see art as a substitute for action. In 1968, he
began teaching at Queens College, CUNY, where he was part of the SEEK (Search
for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program designed to help students from
underserved areas prepare for college. In 1969, he was a founding member of the
Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which advocated for greater
representation of black artists, curators, and intellectuals within major
museums. In 1971, the art classes he had been teaching at the Manhattan
Detention Complex became the cornerstone of a nation-wide prison art program.
From 1982 to 1984, he directed the NEA’s Visual Arts Program, and shortly
before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on an art project in the Gulf
Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, he and his wife,
sculptor Nene Humphrey, established the Benny Andrews Foundation to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to
encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. In 2008,
The Foundation donated over 300 of Andrews’s artworks to the United Negro
College Fund (UNCF) to be distributed to appropriate cultural and
educational institutions that will use the artworks as a foundation for
education initiatives.
In 2008, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery became the representative of
the estate of Benny Andrews, but the gallery has been exhibiting his work regularly
since 1994. Most recently, Andrews was part of the 2012 exhibition Benny
Andrews, Bob Thompson, Alice Neel, which brought together three New
York friends, who steadily pursued figural expressionism in a creative
landscape dominated by abstraction and minimalism.
Lowery Stokes Sims, author of “Benny
Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back,” is the Charles
Bronfman International Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. She was on the
education and curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1972-1999
before serving as executive director, president, and adjunct curator for
the permanent collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-2007). A
specialist in modern and contemporary art, Sims is known for her expertise in
the work of African, Latino, Native, and Asian American artists. She has
lectured and guest curated exhibitions nationally and internationally and was a
visiting professor at Queens College and Hunter College in New York City, a
fellow at the Clark Art Institute, and a visiting scholar in the Department of
Art at the University of Minnesota in 2007. She has also served on the
selection jury for the World Trade Center memorial and is on the boards of
ArtTable, Inc., the Tiffany Foundation, and Art Matters, Inc.
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