CV and Chronology

Born November 13, 1930, Madison, GA
Died November 10, 2006, New York, NY

1954 - 1958   BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1957           Esquire Theater, Chicago, IL

1960           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1961           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1962           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Forum Gallery, New York, NY

1963           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1964           Benny Andrews: Recent Oil Paintings, Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Forum Gallery, New York, NY

1965           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1966           Benny Andrews: The Artist In His Environment, Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Bray-Hampton Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Henri Gallery, Alexandria, VA
Forum Gallery, New York, NY

1967           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1968           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1969           Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1970           Acts of Art Gallery, New York, NY
Paul Kessler Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1971           Benny Andrews: Symbols and Other Works, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY
Paintings & Drawings by Benny Andrews, Wabash College, Crawford, IN; Spelman College, Atlanta, GA; Talladega College, Talladega, AL

1972           Paintings and Watercolors including “Trash,” ACA Galleries, New York, NY

1973           Circle, ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Afro-American Cultural Center at the American International College, Springfield, MA
Aronson Gallery, Atlanta, GA

1975           Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Dorchester, MA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Gallery 7, Detroit, MI
Rockefeller Fine Arts Building, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA
Works from Benny Andrews Bicentennial Series, Gallery Lounge, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT
Benny Andrews: Paintings and Drawings, Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Benny Andrews: Strung Out, Aronson Gallery, Atlanta, GA
ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Gallery of Sarasota, Sarasota, FL

1976           Benny Andrews: Works on Paper, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT
Gallery of Sarasota, Sarasota, FL
Afro-American Cultural Center, American International College, Springfield, MA
Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA

1977           Benny Andrews: Paintings, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
Art Gallery, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL
Illinois State University, Normal, IL
Tirsa Karlis Gallery, Provincetown, MA

1978           Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Benny Andrews/Matrix 42, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Women I’ve Known, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
Benny Andrews, Adley Gallery, Sarasota, FL
Handshake Gallery, Atlanta, GA

1979           Women I’ve Known, Part II, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
Selma Burke Art Center, Pittsburgh, PA
Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN
Benny Andrews, Phoenix Arts and Theater Company, Atlanta, GA

1980           Benny Andrews: Flight, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
Benny Andrews: Recent Prints, Paintings, Drawings, AAMARP (Afro-American Master Artist in Residence Program) Visual Arts Complex, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Benny Andrews: Bicentennial Series, Fine Art Center Gallery of the State University of Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY
Douglas High School Gallery, Atlanta, GA

1981           Benny Andrews: Still Lifes, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
Benny Andrews, Firehouse Gallery, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY
Benny Andrews, HUB Gallery, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Benny Andrews: Drawings and Paintings, CRT Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT
Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge MA

1982           Albany Museum of Art, Albany, GA
Benny Andrews Retrospective, Loker Gallery, The California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture (now California African American Museum), Los Angeles, CA
Pine Bluff Art Center, Pine Bluff, AR
Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA
Benny Andrews, Port Washington Public Library, Port Washington, NY
Benny Andrews: Recent Works, Nyangoma Gallery, Washington, DC

1983          Benny Andrews: Recent Paintings, Collages, Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, NY
Benny Andrews: 25 Years of Drawing, Glass Gallery, New York, NY
Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA

1984          Benny Andrews: Recent Works, Gallery Two Nine One, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Recent Works on Paper, Merida Gallery, Louisville, KY
Icons and Images in the Work of Benny Andrews, circulated by the Southern Arts Federation; Shelton State Community College, Tuscaloosa, AL; Waterworks Gallery, Salisbury, NC; Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN

1985          Benny Andrews: Completing the Circle, Armstrong Gallery, New York, NY

1986          Portraits Of…, Armstrong Gallery, New York, NY; Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT
Benny Andrews: Completing the Circle of L'Enfant's Washington, D.C., Stanback Museum and Planetarium, South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, SC
Mixed Media by Benny Andrews, Urban League Gallery, Newark, NJ
Masterworks Series Inaugural: Mixed Media by Benny Andrews, The Works Gallery, Newark, NJ

1987          Benny Andrews: Recent Works on Paper, Albany Museum of Art, Albany, GA
Southland: Paintings and Collages by Benny Andrews, Gallery Two Nine One, Atlanta, GA
Bennie Andrews, Isobel Neal Gallery, Chicago, IL
Benny Andrews, Shifflett Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1988          The Collages of Benny Andrews, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY
Portraits Of…, High Museum of Art at Georgia-Pacific Center, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Recent Works of Art, Adirondack Community College Visual Arts Gallery, Queensbury, NY
The Art Gallery at Lazarus Downtown, Columbus, OH

1989          Benny Andrews: Selected Works on Paper, Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, Danville, VA
Benny Andrews [“Games” and other works from the “Southland Series”], McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews, Gross McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Benny Andrews: A Modern Master, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Benny Andrews: With Georgia on My Mind, Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Works on Paper: Benny Andrews, Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN

1990          Benny Andrews, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
Benny Andrews: A Retrospective, 1957-1990, Ratner Gallery, Chicago, IL
Benny Andrews: People, Places, Predators , Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, NY
Works by Benny Andrews, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Works on Paper, Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Benny Andrews: Like a Sublime Love, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Benny Andrews: America Series and Other Works, The Gallery at COCA, St. Louis, MO
Benny Andrews, The Gallery, Fine Arts Hall, Columbus College (now Columbus State University), Columbus, GA
Gwinnett Council for the Arts Gallery, Lawrenceville, GA
America: A Collection of Work by Benny Andrews, The Gallery, Tate Student Center, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA
As Seen by Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the War, Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, CO; Ferris State University, Big Rapids, MI; New England College, Henniker, NH,; Southwest Missouri State University; UCLA Wight Gallery; National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam

1991          Benny Andrews: Collages and Drawings, Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Reflections on a Southern Life, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Recent Work, Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Benny Andrews: America Series, Rutledge Gallery II, Winthrop College, Rock Hill, SC

1992          Benny Andrews: The America Series, Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Fine Arts Museum of the South (now Mobile Museum of Art), Mobile, AL; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR
Benny Andrews: New Work, Susan Conway Galleries, Washington, DC
Benny Andrews: America Series, Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, NY

1993          The Art of Benny Andrews, Museum of African-American Art, Tampa, FL
Benny Andrews, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews, Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Benny Andrews: Collages and Drawings, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI

1994          Benny Andrews: America Series, Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Benny Andrews: Collages and Drawings, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Cruelty and Sorrow, Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT

1995          The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH
Homecoming by Benny Andrews, Tubman African American Museum (now The Tubman Museum), Macon, GA
Benny Andrews: Chronicles and Recollections, Printed Image Gallery, Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; Wilson and Hall Galleries, Alumni Memorial Building (now Lehigh University Art Galleries), Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
Selections from The Revival Series by Benny Andrews, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY
Works on Paper by Benny Andrews, Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Benny Andrews: Revival Series, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Benny Andrews: 35 Years of Selected Works, African American Cultural Center Gallery, Witherspoon Student Center, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
The Art of Benny Andrews, Bomani Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Benny Andrews: People, Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY

1996          Benny Andrews: Cruelty & Sorrow Series, Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC
Benny Andrews: The Music Series, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews, A Retrospective: 1959-1996, Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

1997          American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA
Benny Andrews: Works from the Music, Revival, and Langston Hughes Series, ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Benny Andrews: Selections from a Life in Art, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY
Benny Andrews: Paintings, Drawings, Collages, Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA
Works by Benny Andrews, The Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC
Benny Andrews: The Muses of Benny Andrews, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI

1998          Benny Andrews: Collage, The Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC
Benny Andrews: Selected Works, The Hearne Gallery, Little Rock, AK
Benny Andrews in The Big Easy, The Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA
[Works related to Sky Sash So Blue], Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA
New works on canvas and paper by Benny Andrews, McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Center, Watkinsville, GA
Meet the Masters: Benny Andrews, Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL

1999           A Different Drummer: Benny Andrews, The Music Series, 1991-98, Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed Gallery, The DAAP Galleries, College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH; American Jazz Museum, Kansas City, MO
Benny Andrews: The Critic Series and A Musical Interlude, ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Musical Interludes, The Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC
Benny Andrews: The Painter’s Griot, James E. Kemp Gallery, The Black Academy of Arts and Letters, Dallas Convention Center Theatre Complex, Dallas, TX
Benny Andrews: Selected Works, Bomani Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Benny Andrews: Small Works, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

2000         Benny Andrews’ Drawings and Etchings, Southside Gallery, Oxford, MI
Benny Andrews, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
Observations: Major Works by Benny Andrews, Lower Level Gallery, Suntrust Plaza, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: From the High Museum of Art Collection, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Musical Interludes: Images by Benny Andrews, Ritz Theater and LaVilla Museum, Jacksonville, FL
Benny Andrews: Shades of the Human Spirit, ACA Galleries, New York, NY

2001           Selections, Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN
Benny Andrews: Stations of the Cross, Harrison Museum of African American Culture, Roanoke, VA
Sense and Meaning: The Art of Benny Andrews and Shades of the Human Spirit: New Works by Benny Andrews, Art Museum of Western Virginia (now Taubman Museum of Art), Roanoke, VA
Benny Andrews: The Hickory Chair, New Collages and Paintings, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Dream Variations, Series V, Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA
The Hickory Chair Series: Collage Book Illustrations by Benny Andrews, Atlanta Financial Center, South Tower, Atlanta, GA
Master Visual Artist Revisited: Benny Andrews Exhibition, hosted by the State of Connecticut African-American Affairs Commission, Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT

2002          Benny Andrews: Native Son, Brenau University Galleries, Brenau University, Gainesville, GA
Benny Andrews: Interiors, ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Benny Andrews: Paintings and Prints, Thomasville Cultural Center, Thomasville, GA
Where I’m Comin’ From: The Art of Benny Andrews, York College Art Gallery, City University of New York, New York, NY

2003          Benny Andrews: Collage and Line, Pei Ling Chan Gallery, Savannah, GA
Benny Andrews: The Human Spirit Series, Winthrop University Galleries, Rock Hill, SC
Benny Andrews: Pictures for Miss Josie, New Collages and Drawings, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI; Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, GA; Hearne Fine Art, Little Rock, AR; Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA
Startling Figures: The Art of Benny Andrews, Blackbridge Hall Gallery, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, GA
Benny Andrews: Painting Stories, The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Women I Have Known: A Survey of Work by Benny Andrews, Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, VA
Detroit Collects Benny Andrews, curated by Sherry Washington Gallery, Curtis L. Ivery Art Gallery, Wayne County Community College, Downtown Campus, Detroit, MI
The Carolinas Celebrates Benny Andrews, Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC

2004          Getting the Spirit: Religious Works by Benny Andrews, Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, Eatonville, FL
Benny Andrews: Interiors, Savannah College of Art and Design’s Savannah Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews and Testaments of the Spirit, Lyda Moore Merrick Gallery, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham, NC - in connection with exh, documentary about Andrews is screened as part of the center’s Black Diaspora Film Festival, Feb
Benny Andrews: The Migrant Series, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA; ACA Galleries, New York, NY; Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (now Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art), Virginia Beach, VA
Benny Andrews: Reflections on the Man and his Art, Huntington House Museum, Windsor, CT

2006          Selections of Work by Benny Andrews, Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, GA
Benny Andrews: The John Lewis Series, Parish Gallery, Washington, DC; Mason Murer Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: Delivering Justice, W.W. Law and the Fight for Civil Rights, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Benny Andrews: Trail of Tears (The Migrant Series), ACA Galleries, New York, NY

2007          Benny Andrews: Memorial Exhibition, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
Benny Andrews: Works from the Miles College Collection, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
Benny Andrews: Works on Paper, The Trois Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA
Benny Andrews: A Georgia Artist Comes Home, Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA; Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA
Benny Andrews: Voice of the Artist, Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (now Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library), Emory University, Atlanta, GA
Benny Andrews: The John Lewis Series, The Tubman Museum, Macon, GA; Sumter County Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC (2008); North Carolina Central University Art Museum, Durham, NC (2009); and the Myrtle Beach Art Museum, Myrtle Beach, SC (2009)

2013           Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2014           Selections from the Benny Andrews’ John Lewis Series, National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA

2016           Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
D.R. Glass Library, Texas College, Tyler, TX

2017           Benny Andrews, Library, The MacDowell Colony (now MacDowell), Peterborough, NH

2018           Benny Andrews: Mix Master, Collage and Line Drawings from the Collection of Professor Edward J. Littlejohn, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL
A Celebration of Black History Month with Art Exhibits of the Works of Benny Andrews, Studio Union Library, Hammond Campus and Library Student Faculty Building, Westville Campus, Purdue University Northwest, Hammond and Westville, IN

2019           Benny Andrews, Illustrator, Madison Public Safety Building, Madison, GA; Morgan County African-American Museum, Madison, GA

2020           A Real Person Before The Eyes: The Portraits of Benny Andrews, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

1957           Art Fair, Chicago, IL

1958           1958 Chicago Artists Exhibition, North Exhibition Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL

1959           13th Biennial of Painting and Sculpture, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI

1960           150th Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

1964           New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens

1966           Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
An Exhibition of Art by Benny Andrews, Alice Neel, Tecla, Art Gallery, Countee Cullen Regional Branch, New York Public Library, New York, NY

1967           The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
"Friends of Bob Thompson" Memorial Exhibition, St. Marks Gallery, New York, NY

1968           New Voices: 15 New York Artists, American Greetings Corporation Gallery, organized with the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 

                  30 Contemporary Black Artists, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York, NY; Roberson Center for the Arts and Sciences (now Roberson Museum and Science Center), Binghamton, NY; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), San Francisco, CA; Contemporary Arts Museum – Houston, Houston, TX; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Museum of Art (now RISD Museum), Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Art Galleries (now Art, Design & Architecture Museum), UC Santa Barbara, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

1969           Contemporary Afro-American Artists, Teaneck Public Library, Teaneck, NJ
Afro-American Artists: Since 1950, Sixth Floor Art Gallery, Brooklyn College Student Center, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY

1970           Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, MA; School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, MA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Rhino Horn Group Art Show, Wollman Hall, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY
The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

1971           High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal, Acts of Art Gallery, New York, NY
The Artist as Adversary, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Benny Andrews of New York Meets Juan Logan of North Carolina in Sculptures and Paintings, Mellon Galleries, Grace Library, Carlow College, Pittsburgh, PA
USA…?...1971-72, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie Museum of Art), Pittsburgh, PA
TCB: Taking Care of Business, Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Dorchester, MA

1972           The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
Black American Experiences, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY

1973           The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
Blacks: USA, 1973, New York Cultural Center, New York, NY
Rhino Horn: New Paintings, Herbert Benevy Gallery, New York, NY
A Tribute to Ludvik Durchanek, Harkaway Hall, Bennett College, Millbrook, NY

1974           The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
19th Annual Print Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

1975           Jubilee, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Black American Art and Music, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (the State Art Museum of Florida), Florida State University, Sarasota, FL
[Group exhibition with Benny Andrews, Norman Ives, James Daugherty, Ben Johnson, Josef Albers, Nicolas Krashenik, Ellyn Saffa, Tony Keck], Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT

1976           The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
A Patriotic Show, Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, NY
Inaugural Exhibition - Part II: Selections from the New York University Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY
Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA

1977           Tenth International Print Biennial Exhibition, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
Provincetown Painters: 1890s-1970s, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
Two-Person Show: Benny Andrews and Walter Jackson, Jackson State University’s Festival of the Arts; Jackson State University, Jackson, MS
Master Works from Private Collections, Gallery of Sarasota, Sarasota, FL
America Drawn and Matched, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Benny Andrews, May Stevens: Paintings and Drawings, Pelham-Stoffler Gallery, Houston TX

1978           High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Four Directions, Allen Priebe Gallery, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh, Oshkosh, WI (with Reginald Gammon, Al Loving and Alfred J. Smith)
Portraits and People, Glass Gallery, New York, NY

1979           100 Artists 100 Years: Alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
[Benny Andrews and Herb Williams], Mississippi Valley State University, Greenville, MS

1980           Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Six Black Artists, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
[Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, James Toately], St. Paul School, Concord, NH

1981           19th and 20th Century American Paintings from the New York University Art Collection, Jamaica Arts Center (now Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning), Jamaica, NY

1982           Black Artists, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
Sculpture on Shoreline Sites, presented by AREA (Artists Representing Environmental Art), Sculpture Garden, Manhattan Psychiatric Center, Ward’s Island, New York, NY

1983           Celebrating Contemporary American Black Artists, Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hemstead, NY
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
The Permanent Collection: Highlights and Recent Acquisitions, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY

1984           National Academy of Design, New York, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Since the Harlem Renaissance: 50 Years of Afro-American Art, Center Gallery (now the Samek Art Museum), Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, State University of New York, Old Westbury, Long Island, NY; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY
The Political Reconstruction of Art: New Acquisitions, University Gallery, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

1985           Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Lang Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA; Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, MA; Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, VA; New York State Museum, Albany, NY; David and Alfred Smart Gallery (now Smart Museum of Art),  University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Tower Fine Arts Center, SUNY Brockport, NY
Art is a Family Affair, SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY

1986           The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Faces and Figures, Adirondack Community College Visual Arts Gallery, Queensbury, NY; Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
Ten Artists/Ten Years, Gallery Two Nine One, Atlanta, GA; Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA

1987           Off the Wall: Benny Andrews and John Hardy, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY
The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
Works by Ten Celebrated African-American Artists, Pump House Gallery, Bushnell Park, Hartford, CT
Georgia Artists: State Collection, part of the Georgia Art Bus Program organized by the Georgia Council for the Arts, Sope Creek Elementary School, Marietta, GA

1988           Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
The Artist's Mother: Portraits and Homages, National Portrait Gallery, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
The Turning Point: Art and Politics in Nineteen Sixty-Eight, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY
7th Annual Spotlight on Georgia Artists Show and Auction to benefit Trinity School, Artists’ Market, Ersatz Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Reflections: The Dream… The Reality, Robert T. Wright Community Gallery of Art, College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL
Contemporary Artists in Georgia: Selections From the Collection, The High Museum of Art at Georgia-Pacific Center, Atlanta, GA
Works on Paper, Glass Gallery, New York, NY

1989           USSR Artist Union/Kudnetshy Mmost Hall, Moscow, Russia
The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
Looking South: A Different Dixie, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN
Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, Cheekwood Fine Arts Center (now Cheekwood Estate and Gardens), Nashville, TN
By Gift and Purchase - 1988, Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA

1990           Black USA, Overholland Museum, Amsterdam, Holland
The Andrews Family of Morgan County, Georgia: Arts & Letters in Rural Georgia, in collaboration with the Uncle Remus Regional Library System, Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA [Recent Works by Benny and George Andrews, Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA; Arts, Letters & Andrews Family Memorabilia, Morgan County Library, Madison, GA]
Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews, circulated by the Southern Arts Federation; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; Lee Gallery, Clemson University, Clemson, SC; Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture), Charlotte, NC; Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, GA; Wichita Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
The Permanent Collection: New Acquisitions, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Celebrations: Sights and Sounds of Being, Fisher Gallery (now USC Fisher Museum of Art), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Gwinnett Collects, Gwinnett Council for the Arts Gallery, Lawrenceville, GA
Celebrating America’s Great Rights: The Artists’ Perspective, Happy Days Visitor Center, Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, OH

1991           High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, The Beach Institute African-American Cultural Center / King-Tisdell Cottage, Savannah, GA; Hammonds House Galleries and Resource Center (now Hammonds House Museum), Atlanta, GA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Boston University Art Galleries, Boston University, Boston, MA; Main Gallery, Arts Consortium of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH; UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), San Antonio, TX; Canton Art Institute (now Canton Museum of Art), Canton, OH; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Art Gallery, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, Pittsburgh, PA; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, Nashville, TN; Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Walter Anderson Museum of Art, Ocean Springs, MS; Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, LA; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; The Museum of Art/Tallahassee, Tallahassee, FL; Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA; Henry Ford Museum (now The Henry Ford), Dearborn, MI; Gibbes    Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA; Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, TX; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
Art and Literature by the Andrews: Benny, George, Viola, Christopher, Thomas, and Raymond, Alma Simmons Memorial Art Gallery, Frederick Douglass High School, Atlanta, GA
Seven from Manhattan, Susan Conway Carroll Galleries, Washington, DC
Georgia Artists: State Collection, Quinlan Visual Arts Center, Gainesville, GA

1992     Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Dream Singers, Story Tellers, and African-American Presence, Fukui Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; The Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Tokushima, Otani Memorial Art Museum, Japan; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA
Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, NY
R.F. Brush Art Gallery, Canton, NY
The National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY
The Family, Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

1993           Louisiana Arts & Science Center, Baton Rouge, LA
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH
The Black Family, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee WI

1994           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Norman R. Eppink Museum, Emporia, KS
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art, San Antonio Museum of   Art, San Antonio, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, GA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Justin Schorr, Benny Andrews, Young-Ha Park, Gallery Korea, Korean Cultural Service, New York, NY
Twelfth Annual Artist’s Salute to Black History Month: Our Children...Our Hope, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, Los Angeles, CA
Empowerment: The Art of African American Artists, Krasdale Gallery, White Plains, NY

1995           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, II, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
Empowerment: The Art of African American Artists, Krasdale Gallery, White Plains, NY
Glass Gallery, New York, NY
New South/Old South, Somewhere in Between, Winthrop University Galleries, Rock Hill, SC

1996           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, III, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Community of Creativity: A Century of MacDowell Colony Artists, Currier Gallery of Art (now Currier Museum of Art), Manchester, NH; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA
In Celebration of Black History Month 1996, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Black History Month Exhibition, Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI
From the Spirit, Knoke Galleries, Atlanta, GA
Primal Passion, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Montgomery Collects: A Panorama of 20th Century Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL

1997           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IV, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Fisk University Galleries, Fisk University, Nashville, TN
Civil Progress: Images of Black America, Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY
Revisiting American Art: Works from the Collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Queens Artists: Highlights of the 20th Century, Queens Museum, New York, NY

1998           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, V, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; The Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
Portraiture: Not By Definition, Westby Art Gallery, NC
Masterworks by 20th Century African American Artists, Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH; Riffe Gallery, Ohio Arts Council, Columbus, OH
“The Bridge to Healing:” Moore’s Ford Memorial Art Exhibition, Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Center, Watkinsville, GA
A Song and A Dance, The Sutton Collection, The Shoppes of Magnolia Marketplace, Cary, NC

1999           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VI, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
Beyond the Veil: The Arts of African American Artists at Centuries End, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL
Interludes: Romare Bearden, Richard Mayhew, Faith Ringgold, Benny Andrews, Barkley Hendricks, Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery, Fairfield, CT
Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY
When the Spirit Moves: African-American Art Inspired by Dance, Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH; Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA; Arts and Industries Building, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Founders and Friends Exhibition, Cinque Gallery, New York, NY
Master Impressions: Limited Edition Lithographs, Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, GA
The Paul Jones Collection: Art and Everyday Life, Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, GA
African-American Art Exhibition, Craven Gallery, West Tisbury, MA
Homage, Cecile R. Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St.Louis, MO
Third Annual Rising Stars Art Exhibition and Auction, sponsored by Charlotte Latin Schools, Shorenstein Gallery, Carillon Building, Charlotte, NC
Residual Values: Artists Remember Past Residencies, Tryon Center for Visual Arts, Charlotte, NC

2000          African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, FL
The Art of Family: Benny Andrews and Nene Humphrey, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
The Art of Family: Benny Andrews and Nene Humphrey, Tremaine Gallery, Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT
A Growing Presence: Art by African Americans, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Then and Now, 1941-2001, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
George “The Dot Man” and Benny Andrews, Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, GA
African American Art @ 2000: Public Voices, Private Visions, Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY

2001           African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, VIII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC,
New York, NY; Texas Southern University Museum, Houston, TX
African-American Icons of the 20th Century, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, MS
Silver Selections Twenty-Five Years of Exhibitions at the Cultural Center, Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA
Thy Mother is Like a Vine in Thy Blood: Viola P. Andrews and the Andrews Family, Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA

2002          African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, IX, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
ACA Galleries, New York, NY
Successions: Prints by African American Artists from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, The Art Gallery, MD
Through Our Eyes 2002: Celebrating Ten Years of African American Artistic Expression, LaVilla Museum, Jacksonville, FL
Creative Space : Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, International Print Center New York (ICPNY), New York, NY; North Gallery, Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College of Art, Chicago, IL; North Carolina Central University Art Museum, Durham, NC; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX

2003          African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, X, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Flanders Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN
The Human Figure, ACA Galleries, New York, NY
New South, Old South, Somewhere in Between, Levine Museum, Charlotte, NC
Sheroes and Wonder Women, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham, NC
The Story of the South: Art and Culture, 1890-2003, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA
HairStories, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL

2004          Southern Journeys, Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA
New York Show, Opelousas Museum of Art, Opelousas, LA
Red Velvet Cake: Art in the Atrium, Morris County Administration and Records Building, Morristown, NJ
Winter Solstice, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Self-Portraits, Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI
Succession: Prints by African-American Artists From the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, Carl J. Murphy Fine Arts Center, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD; NC Central University Art Museum, Durham, NC
Common Cause: Collecting African-American Art, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham, NC
A Century of African-American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection, Old College and Mechanical Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE

2005          Sports Illustrated, The Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY
True Colors: Meditations of the American Spirit, Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, MI
Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA
The Chemistry of Color: African-American Artists in Philadelphia, 1970-1990, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Main Line Collects: Distinctive Choices, Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA
Focus: Corporate Collections, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia at SunTrust Plaza, Atlanta, GA

2006          Masterpieces of African American Art: An African American Perspective, M. Hanks Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
Art of the Book, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah Gallery, Atlanta, GA
Drawn in Georgia, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA
Racing on a Broken Road, Castle Gallery, The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY
Paper Trail: African American Works on Paper, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA

2007          American Visions, Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH
African-American Masters, The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ
At Freedman's Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture and the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD
The Harmon & Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art Works On Paper Traveling Exhibition, Historic City Hall Arts & Culture Center, Lake Charles, LA; College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, OK; Lore Degenstein Gallery, Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA; Amon carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Customs House Museum, Clarksville, TN
African-American Works, Bank of America Gallery, Lobby, Hearst Tower (now Truist Center), Charlotte, NC
The Freedom Place Collection, Zenith Gallery, Washington, DC
Preserving a Legacy: National African American Fine Art Show, August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh, PA

2008          African American Art:  200 Years, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
What Makes It American? A Selection from the Collection, The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA
Tellin’ It Like It Is: The Art of Curlee Raven Holton: Prints, Drawings and Selections from the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, GA
In Remembrance: Artists from the Paul R. Jones Collection, Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
Face Forward: American Portraits from Sargent to the Present, Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, FL

2009         The Chemistry of Color, The Sorgenti Collection of Contemporary African American Art, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
Liberty and The Land: Benny Andrews and William Villalongo, Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space, New York, NY
African American Currents: Contemporary Art from the Bank of America Collection, 40 Acres Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA
Painting the People, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA

2010           ART in Embassies Exhibition, United States Ambassador David Adelman Residence, Singapore
Westbeth Pioneers, Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY
Charlotte Collects African American Art, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Levine Center for the Arts, Charlotte, NC

2011           Beyond Bearden: Creative Responses, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC
From the Hand: Drawings From the Hofstra University Museum Collection, Hofstra    University Museum, Hempstead, NY
Face Off: Portraits by Contemporary Artists, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT
The Freedom Place Collection, Mercer Gallery, Monroe Community College, Rochester, NY
Mixing Metaphors, African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA
Collage, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Promises of Freedom: Selections from the Arthur Primas Collection, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, Auburn, AL

2012           African American Art: Harlem Renaissance Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Muscarelle Museum of Art, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA; The Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
San Antonio Collects:  African American Artists, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX
Successions: Prints by African American Artists from the Jean & Robert Steele Collection, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia Museum of Art,   Philadelphia, PA
African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from The David C. Driskell Center, organized by Smithsonian Institute of Traveling Exhibition Services (SITES), The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC; Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH
Benny Andrews, Alice Neel, Bob Thompson, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
...On Paper, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
INsite/INchelsea: The Inaugural Exhibition, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
African American Artists from the Collection, Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL
The Art of Friendship: The Collection of George Deem, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
The Patrick and Judy Diamond Collection, Helms Gallery, Batte Center, Wingate University, Wingate, NC

2013           Ashé to Amen: African-Americans and Biblical Imagery, Museum of Biblical Art, New York, NY; Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture; Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, TN
Classless Society, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
Inspired Georgia: 28 Works from Georgia’s State Art Collection, Quinlan Arts Center, Gainesville, GA; Monroe Arts Guild, Monroe, GA; Stephens County Historical Museum, Toccoa, GA; Paradise Garden, Summerville, GA; Dogwood City Art Gallery, Tallapoosa, GA; Arts Clayton, Jonesboro, GA; The Carnegie Library, Dublin, GA; Georgia Museum of Agriculture at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, Tifton, GA;  Historic Train Depot, Kingsland, GA

2014           Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in The Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
RISING UP/UPRISING: Twentieth Century African American Art, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
The Harmon & Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works on Paper, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
ART in Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State, Embassy of the United States of America, Rabat, Morocco
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA          
Benny Andrews and Patrice Renee Washington: TALKING, Blackburn 20/20, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York, NY
Solitary Soul, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY  

2015           ART in Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State, Embassy of the United States of America, Maseru, Lethoso
Gems from the Flomenhaft Collection: Works on Paper, Flomenhaft Gallery, New York, NY
Common Ground: African American Art from the Flint Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and the Muskegon Museum of Art, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI
Collectors Legacy: Selections from the Sandra Lloyd Baccus Collection, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD
After 1965: Art in a Time of Social Unrest, Neuberger Museum at Purchase College, Purchase, NY

50 Objects/50 Years, Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT

2016           The Color Line: African American Artists and the Civil Rights in the United States, Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, France
Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Speed Art Museum at the University of Louisville, KY
Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Circa 1970, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
The Human Image: From Velázquez to Viola, Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York, NY

2017           Picturing Mississippi: Land of Plenty, Pain and Promise, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX
1967: Parallels in Black Art and Rebellion, Charles Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI
Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Expanding Tradition: Selections from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
Sitting Still, BravinLee programs, New York, NY
Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
Multiple Modernisms, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Figuratively Speaking, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art: Works on Paper, The Rockwell Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Corning, NY

2018           Telling a People’s Story: African-American Children’s Illustrated Literature, Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, OH
Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
We The People: American Art of Social Concern, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's Ballet Trailblazer, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY
Our Voice: Celebrating the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature, Abilene, TX; The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA
Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA
Histórias Afro-Atlânticas, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil
Talisman in the Age of Difference, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, England
Truth & Beauty: Charles White and His Circle, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, NY
50th Collectors Show and Sale, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR
Highlights from the Art Collection of Bennett College, Delta Arts Center, Winston Salem, NC
Selections from the Freedom Place Collection, presented by Zenith Gallery, Congressional Bank, Washington, DC

2019           Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell and organized by the New Museum, New York, NY; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design, organized in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts (AFA); The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; The Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Notes and Tones: Jazz Influences on the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Department of Cultural Affairs, Hudson County Community College, Jersey City, NJ
On Their Own Terms, Brad Cushman and Small Galleries, Windgate Center of Art + Design, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR
A Tale of Two Collections, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Detroit Collects: Selections of African American Art from Private Collections, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME
New Symphony of Time, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
In The Absence of Light: Gesture, Humor and Resistance in The Black Aesthetic, organized by Theaster Gates in collaboration with Beth Rudin DeWoody and Laura Dvorkin, Stony Island Arts Bank, Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, IL
African American Art in the 20th Century, organized by Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA
“War Within, War Without,” Collection 1940s-1970s, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Acts of Faith: Selections from the Collection of Will and Cheryl Sutton, The Gallery by Origin Bank, Monroe Regional Airport, Monroe, LA
Oppositions: Art and Power in the Vietnam Era, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH

2020          Spectrum: A Celebration of Artistic Diversity, Richard and Barbara Basch Visual Arts Center, Ringling College of Art + Design, Sarasota, FL
Tell Me Your Story: 100 Years of Storytelling in African American Art, curated by Rob Perrée, Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoort, The Netherlands
Catalyst: Art and Social Change, curated by Jessica Brown Bell, Gracie Mansion, New York, NY
Picture the Dream: The Story of Civil Rights through Children’s Books, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA
Saints and Sin: Selections from the Permanent Collection by Black Artists, Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA
Selected Works from The Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at the University of Alabama, Houston Museum of African American Culture, Houston, TX
The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works On Paper, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX
Paper Power, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Graphic Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Duke University, Durham, NC
Ebony Broadsides: Celebration of the Masters, African American Research Library and Cultural Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Ulrich + Artists + You Community Billboard Project, organized by Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
50X50: Stories of Visionary Artists from the Collection, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA 

2021     Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
African American Art in the 20th Century: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
Vision & Spirit: African American Art | Works from the Bank of America Collection, Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Levine Center for the Arts, Charlotte, NC
Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists, The Art Students League, New York, NY

1965-66       John Hay Whitney Fellowship

1971-81        New York Council on the Arts Fellowships

1973              MacDowell Colony Fellowship (also 1974, 1975, 1978)
City of New York Certificate of Merit

1974-81         National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

1982              Michael Karolyi Foundation Fellowship, Vence, France

1976              Ohara Museum Prize, Tokyo, Japan

1987              Bellagio Study and Conference Center Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, Italy

1990              Presidential Research Award, Queens College, NY

1992              Smith-Anderson Gallery Print Workshop Fellowship, Palo Alto, CA

1993              Artist of the Year, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY

1994              James Van Der Zee Award, Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA

1995              Arts Achievement Award, Queens Museum of Art, NY
The Coca-Cola Company Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Leadership, Atlanta, GA

1997              Member, National Academy of Design, New York, NY

1999              Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, GA

2007              Coretta Scott King Book Awards’ Illustrator Honor Award

2010              President’s Award to The Benny Andrews Foundation, United Negro College Fund, Fairfax, VA

Albany Museum of Art, Albany, GA
Allen University, Columbia, SC
Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA
Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
The Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff, AR
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Benedict University, Columbia, SC
Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, FL
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME
Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, PA
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Claflin University, Orangeburg, SC
Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA
The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the            African Diaspora, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Dillard University, New Orleans, LA
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Florida Memorial University, Miami Gardens, FL
Furlong Gallery, University of Wisconsin - Stout, Menomonie, WI
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Georgia State Art Collection, Atlanta, GA
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC
Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, New York University, New York, NY
Guilford College Art Gallery, Guilford College, Greensboro, NC
Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta, GA
Hampton University Museum, Hampton University, Hampton, VA
Harlem Art Collection, New York State Office of General Services, Albany, NY and New York, NY
Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Levine Center for the Arts, Charlotte, NC
Henry Clinton Taylor Collection, University Galleries, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Hofstra University Museum of Art, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT
Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN
Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL
ITC (Interdenominational Theology Center), Atlanta, GA
Jarvis Christian College, Hawkins, TX
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (the State Art Museum of Florida), Florida State University, Sarasota, FL
Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, NC
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI
LaGrange Art Museum, LaGrange, GA
Legacy Museum, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL
Lehigh University Art Galleries, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
LeMoyne-Owen College, Memphis, TN
Lane College Library, Lane College, Jackson, TN
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA
Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY 
Miles College, Fairfield, AL
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL
Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA
Morris College, Sumter, SC
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., New York, NY, and Washington, DC
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan
The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA      
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Philander Smith College, Little Rock, AR
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
The Rockwell Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Corning, NY
Rust College, Holly Springs, MS
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
San José Museum of Art, San José, CA
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York NY
Shaw University, Raleigh, NC
Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Special Collections, Wright-Potts Library, Voorhees College, Denmark, SC
Spelman College, Atlanta, GA
Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Bennett College, Greensboro, NC
Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Talladega College, Talladega, AL
Texas College, Tyler, TX
Tougaloo College Art Collections, Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, MS
The Tubman Museum, Macon, GA
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
United Negro College Fund, Washington, DC
University of Delaware,  Museums Collections, Library, Museums and Press, Newark DE
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI
University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, WY
Virginia Union University, Richmond, VA
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS
The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Wiley College, Marshall, TX
Xavier University of Louisiana Art Collection, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA
Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, Eatonville, FL 

 1930-1934       

Benny Andrews is born on November 13, 1930, in Plainview, Georgia, a farming community three miles from Madison, to George and Viola Andrews. He is one of ten children. George is a sharecropper and self-taught artist.

 Benny Andrews makes his first drawings at the age of three.

1935-1942       

Andrews’ grandmother, Jessie, has his grandfather build a two-room wood-frame house on the family’s land for George, Viola, and their children. Although Benny Andrews begins working in the fields as a young child, his memories of this house and the security of his family are good ones. 

 Andrews attends Plainview Elementary School, a one-and-a-half room log cabin built by the Plainview Black community; in elementary school, he begins to create his own comic characters.

1943    

The family moves to a different farm and begins sharecropping for the Mason family. In their free time, Andrews and his younger brother Raymond begin making books of illustrations, lists, and short articles charting their interests in movies, World War II, and popular culture.

1944    

Because education past the seventh grade is severely discouraged in the sharecropping system, Andrews’ mother, determined that her children will make it through high school, works out an arrangement with the Mason family that Benny Andrews will attend school when it is not possible to work in the fields. Under this agreement, he enrolls in Burney Street High School in the town of Madison, Georgia, and attends only for the five months of the school year that he is not required to plant or harvest cotton. While in the classroom, Andrews turns to art as an outlet. He later recalls: “[W]hen I went to high school, I had to do something to offset the loss of time when I went to pick cotton. I never got more than four or five months in and fell behind. So I drew all the biology and plane geometry projects and everything the teachers asked me to draw. My drawing had become a necessity.”[1]

1948    

Andrews is the first in his family to finish high school. Andrews graduates from Burney Street, travels to Atlanta, and lives at the Butler Street YMCA.

 The 4-H Club grants Andrews a small scholarship to attend one of the three black state colleges in Georgia. He enters Fort Valley State College in September, taking a job in the art department, where he meets and studies with printmaker and muralist Lawrence Arthur Jones (1910-1996).

1950-1954       

With the end of his scholarship, failing in almost every class, and frustrated by the lack of opportunity to study art, Andrews enlists in the US Air Force on July 26, 1950. He serves for the entire duration of the Korean War, attaining the rank of Staff Sergeant and receiving an honorable discharge on July 29, 1954. After the war, funding from the GI Bill enables Andrews to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

1954-1958       

In September 1954, Andrews arrives in Chicago to begin his studies at SAIC. He is one of only a few of Black students [Andrews says 9]. His first visit to the Art Institute is his first to an art museum of any kind. 

While at SAIC, he develops his distinctive style of contour line drawing, as well as his practice of adding collaged material to paintings in oil on canvas: both of which will be essential elements of his art practice throughout his career.

As he progresses, Andrews is frustrated to find his painting classes are dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and that his focus on figurative painting makes him an outlier. He would later write, “During this time, the mid 50’s, (in Chicago anyway) abstract expression was the only acceptable contemporary way for painters to work. To do anything else was the equivalent of blasphemy. ... To work representational was to be shunted aside as being “non-creative”…”.[2]

During his stay in Chicago, Andrews explores the entire city, drawing and painting in its many neighborhoods. He spends much of his time in bars and nightclubs on the West and South Sides. He is rejected for every exhibition, organization, and club at the Art Institute of Chicago, and finds artistic work outside of the institution. Andrews is hired as a staff artist for the Bridgeport News, a community newspaper based on the South Side of Chicago. He draws political cartoons, illustrations for columns, and community service ads for the paper while continuing his studies.

1957

Andrews gains public exposure in Chicago, participating in a citywide art fair in June. The Bridgeport News announces the exhibition and reproduces a drawing from a page of Andrews’ sketchbook on the front page of its June 5 issue; the drawing illustrates a young man, seated over an open sketchbook, and the image includes a printed caption: “Young artist paints the city.”

In September, the Esquire Theater, an elegant movie theater in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, hosts a solo exhibition of Andrews’ paintings in its in-lobby art gallery.

During his studies at SAIC, Andrews becomes struck by the school’s African American janitors. Inspired by the service workers and their environment, Andrews begins studying their faces and experimenting with their materials, such as towels and toilet tissues. He creates a seminal work, Janitors at Rest (1957-58), which is the first introduction of collage into his painting. Searching for a visual language to capture the immediacy of everyday life and the quotidian nature of his subject matter, Andrews develops and hones a technique of “rough collage,” combining scraps of paper and cloth with oil paint on canvas. As he would later explain, “I started working with collage because I found oil paint so sophisticated, and I didn’t want to lose my sense of rawness.” This critical component would inform the rest of his artistic career. Work on Janitors at Rest begins during Andrews’ last year of school and becomes a turning point for him as he begins to completely devote himself to painting. At the same time, he is studying with the painter Boris Margo (1902-1995), “the instructor who had encouraged him to paint what he knew, what he felt.”

Reflecting on the creation of Janitors at Rest, Andrews would later write:

“I placed the two little wads of tissues on a stool in front of my newly stretched canvas and sat back and started to think, Who are these men? They are the school janitors to us, Black and White, but in their minds they were much more. Yet here I am trying to think of some way to express my feelings for them that transcends the superficial jobs that they are stuck with, but how? I started fingering the two wads of paper and I thought, ‘Why not paste it on my canvas with no prescribed idea of designs or even picture, just paste it on at random. I know it is representative of an environment that they exist in, so if I put that on my canvas, and started playing around with ideas of them and so forth, maybe I’ll come up with an idea that is not so commonplace.’ I did that and then I started painting their faces. I smeared paint. I kept turning the canvas around, and I even went back to the men’s room a couple of times to talk with them that afternoon. I started working with collage that way, and I have been using it ever since.”[3]

1958    

In July, Andrews receives his bachelor of fine arts degree from SAIC and immediately leaves for New York City with his partner, Mary Ellen Smith.

Andrews and Smith arrive in New York, and a week later, Smith gives birth to their first child, Christopher. Andrews finds an apartment for the family at 130 Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side. He sets up an easel and stays home to paint and care for the baby while Smith works outside of the home.

During his time on the Lower East Side, Andrews meets artists Red Grooms (b.1937), Mimi Gross (b.1940), Lester Johnson (1919-2010) and Nam June Paik (1932-2006).

1959    

Andrews frequents local bars, jazz clubs, and coffee shops, drawing and painting his surroundings.

In August, Smith gives birth to their second child, Thomas, and she and Andrews marry.

Andrews meets artist Bob Thompson (1937-1966), thanks to a chance encounter outside of his apartment on the Lower East Side. Andrews will later recall their meeting in notes for an unpublished autobiography, describing Thompson’s bold, generous demeanor and his black derby hat and dark blue pin-striped suit. These details match those in a painted portrait of Thompson that Andrews will complete in 1966.

In the fall, Andrews exhibits his work in the Washington Square art fair. He sells $400.00 worth of drawings and meets art dealer Paul Kessler. His work is also selected for the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition 13th Biennial of Painting and Sculpture in Michigan.

1960    

In the summer, Kessler mounts the first one-man show of Andrews’ work at his gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Andrews will continue to exhibit every summer for the entire decade. His work is also included in the 150th Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  

With his career as a professional artist gaining momentum, Andrews and his family move to an apartment on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. For additional income, he works in the Christmas card division of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This year, he meets and gets to know painters Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Dick Miller (1923-2008), Emilio Cruz (1938-2004), and Chuck Bowers; he also meets painter-turned-filmmaker Bill Creston (b.1932), and sculptor Ludvik Durchanek (1902-1976).[4] Andrews will create portraits of Durchanek - titled “Louie” - in 1966 and in 1977.

1962    

New York art dealer Bella Fishko opens the Forum Gallery together with Raphael Soyer (1899-1987), Chaim Gross (1904-1991), Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981), Hugo Robus (1885-1964), and others. She invites Andrews to become a member. Andrews meets Soyer, and the two artists become life-long friends. In 1966, Andrews will complete a monumental portrait of Soyer.

Forum Gallery mounts a solo exhibition of Andrews’ work, which receives positive reviews from The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. It is his first solo show in New York, and an announcement for this show is the first time Andrews appears in The New York Times. In The New York Times review, critic Stuart Preston writes, “Nothing succeeds like success. Increasingly one comes across painters pouring new wine into old bottles, employing ‘action’ styles and gimmicks for representational subject matter. This operation is carried out most effectively in Benny Andrews’ figure paintings at the Forum Gallery. For one thing, Andrews is a good illustrator, really getting at the personality of his odd, humorous or touching subjects, vividly catching, for example, the mingled greed and suspicion of an old woman fingering fruit in a market. Then he boldly incorporates pieces of torn fabric etc. right into the densely matted pigment, even wrinkling a cloth to stand proxy for a face.” Andrews’ Bread (1961) is reproduced in black-and-white alongside the review.

Andrews and his family take a two-month trip to Mexico, where he sees the murals of José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957). He stays and works in San Miguel de Allende.  He will return to Mexico two more times over the next four years.

1964    

The Forum Gallery mounts another solo exhibition of Andrews’ paintings, and his artwork is also shown at the New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens.

Andrews moves to a loft studio on Beekman Street, near the Brooklyn Bridge. His third child, Julia, is born.

1965    

With funding from a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Andrews returns to rural Georgia, where he reconnects with family and creates a group of works he titles Autobiographical Series.

Andrews paints Death of the Crow in response to the end of the “Jim Crow” era of segregation laws and disenfranchisement of Black people in the American South. The painting depicts a poor farmer cautiously approaching the symbolic crow – his stance suggesting a distrust of its actual demise. The symbolic subject matter recalls the plantation economy that had dominated the South, and the life of Andrews and his family, for much of the 20th century.

1966    

Despite initial resistance from the gallery, the Autobiographical Series is shown at Forum; it is Andrews’ last exhibition with them. His work is included in Contemporary Painting, Sculpture and Graphics at the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City.

In the fall, Andrews begins what will become a long teaching career, leading drawing and painting classes at the New School for Social Research, New York and at the Bayonne, New Jersey Jewish Community Center.

Andrews and expressionist portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1994) are part of a three-person exhibition at the Countee Cullen New York Public Library in Harlem, along with artist Tecla Selnick (1909-1983). Andrews and Neel had been introduced to each other in the early 1960s by Blake Hobbs, head of the Union Settlement in East Harlem. Both figurative artists, Andrews and Neel are also activists concerned with inequality and injustice; they have a close and lifelong friendship.

1967    

The Autobiographical Series is exhibited in communities throughout New York City under the auspices of the Union Settlement House, East Harlem, New York.

Andrews works for an arts and education initiative in the South Bronx known as SOMPSEC (the South Bronx Multi-Purpose Supplementary Educational Center). A Title III project of the New York City public school system, SOMPSEC develops programs that aim to enhance the self-image of minority-group students, to encourage development of their artistic talent, and to increase school-community cooperation. During the school year, SOMPSEC places artists and musicians in local schools to supplement the Center's teaching activities.

1968    

Andrews is included in the group exhibition New Voices: 15 New York Artists at the American Greetings Corporation Gallery, New York which is organized with The Studio Museum in Harlem. Here he meets Norman Lewis (1909-1979) and Reginald Gammon (1921-2005), and notes the exhibition as the first time he becomes aware of a community of Black artists. The exhibition is later expanded and given the title 30 Contemporary Black Artists, and travels to several museums nationwide.

On June 4, Andrews attends the reception to introduce the upcoming exhibition Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum excludes Harlem residents and artists from the exhibition and its planning. In November, Andrews participates in a press conference held by the leading local arts organization, the Harlem Cultural Council, to announce their withdrawal of support from the exhibition.

In June, respected curator Henri Ghent interviews Andrews for the Archives of American Art.[5] Ghent is founding director of the Brooklyn Museum Community Gallery, formed earlier this year in response to demands made by Black artists for their work to be shown in the Brooklyn Museum, and he and Andrews will soon work together in similar efforts of art world activism.

Andrews participates in the invitational benefit exhibition In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (October 31-November 3, 1968). Held seven months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the show comprises works donated by “leading American artists” that are all to be sold to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization largely founded by Dr. King. This is the first exhibition that MoMA has hosted for the benefit of another organization. As indicated in the press release, “the Trustees felt that the Museum galleries should be made available to the American artists who wanted to honor Dr. King and the goals to which he had dedicated his life.” Admission to the exhibition is free for the show’s duration, and the final evening of the exhibition concludes with a literary event with readings  by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Ginsberg in the Museum Auditorium.[6]   

In November, Andrews joins a group of twelve people, including Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) and Henri Ghent, to protest the absence of Black artists in the Whitney Museum’s survey exhibition The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America (October 15 - December 1, 1968).  Andrews, Ghent and other members of this group go on to form the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which will be more formally organized in January 1969. To Andrews and his fellow protestors, this exhibition exemplifies the Whitney’s discrimination on the basis of race, and their protest sparks a series of confrontations against the museum that will continue for the next few years, spearheaded by Andrews.[7] In response to the Whitney’s exhibition, the recently-opened Studio Museum in Harlem mounts the exhibition Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s, which Ghent guest-directs with assistance from Andrews, Ringgold, and others.

That same month (November), Andrews attends a meeting of Black artists at Jack Whitten’s loft, attended by Whitten (1939-2018), Tom Lloyd (1929-1996), Jack White (b.1931), Daniel LaRue Johnson (1938-2017), and others to “chart a course for us as young artists [unencumbered] by the past to move into a new area as far as Blacks and the arts are concerned.”

Macmillan publishes I Am the Darker Brother, a poetry anthology edited by children’s author Arnold Adoff featuring illustrations by Andrews.

Andrews begins teaching at Queens College in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, launched in 1966; he helps to organize a coalition of teachers, counselors, and students in SEEK.

1969    

In January, the BECC is organized to protest Harlem On My Mind at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Andrews is elected as one of its three co-chairs with Henri Ghent and John Sadler. Andrews and the BECC picket the exhibition’s opening for several days. Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Norman Lewis, Roy DeCarava (1919-2009), Tom Lloyd, Reginald Gammon, Earl Miller (1930 -2003), Richard Mayhew (b.1924), Calvin Douglass (b.1931), Felrath Hines (1913-1993), Russ Thompson (b.1922), Frank Sharpe (b.1942), Vivian Browne (1929-1993), Mahler Ryder (1937-1992) and Karen Ryder, Charles Creary, Raymond Saunders (b.1934), Barbara Carter, Joan Sandler (b.1934), Bill Durante, Tecla Selnick (1909-1983), Zeb and Francesca Burgess, Alice Neel, Raphael Soyer, John Dodds and Mel Roman Ramos (1935-2018), among many. Andrews mentions these protests in his journal entries from January 1969, noting that reporters and museumgoers found interest in the BECC’s actions. Thirty years later, reflecting on the fight against The Metropolitan Museum, Andrews will recall, “We had no money. We had no influence. We had no entree into the White museum structure.”[8]

In April, Andrews and Henri Ghent meet with Whitney Museum of Art director John I.H. Baur to begin negotiations between the museum and the BECC over policies regarding discrimination against Black artists. After this initial meeting, the BECC gathers at Andrews’ studio to discuss next steps, and the group comes up with five demands for the museum regarding increased exhibition and collection of work by Black artists and the need to include Black curators. Andrews, along with Ghent, Vivian Browne, and Mahler Ryder, meet with Baur again a week later to present these demands. Andrews documents these meetings, and the subsequent dialogue between the BECC and the museum board, in his journal. These meetings are the beginning of a two-year-long power struggle that will culminate in 1971 when the Whitney presents the exhibition Contemporary Black Artists.

Together with Jay Milder (b.1934), Peter Passuntino (b.1936), Nicholas Sperakis (b.1943), Peter Dean (1934-1993), Michael Fauerbach (1942-2011), Bill Barrell (b.1932), Leonel Gongora (1932-1999), and Ken Bowman (b.1937), Andrews participates in the founding of the Rhino Horn Group, dedicated to figurative expressionism. 

1970    

The Rhino Horn Group mounts their first exhibition at the New School. Andrews has a solo show at the Acts of Art Gallery, a Black-owned gallery in New York City. JET Magazine publishes a blurb about the exhibition in the “New York Beat” section of the November 26 issue. The magazine urges readers to view Andrews’ work, claiming, “For Blackness and militancy in the still form, his works must be checked out.” MoMA acquires drawings from this exhibition, Cross Bearers (1964) and Come Out Fighting (1970).

Andrews’ painting The Champion (1968) is included in the group show The Afro-American Artist: New York and Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The exhibition is co-organized by the National Center for Afro-American Artists.

Andrews receives the Dorne Professorship Award by The University of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

New friendships are formed with artists Robert Berlind (1938-2015), Joan Semmel (b.1932), Michelle Stuart (b.1933) and Ursula von Rydingsvaard (b.1942).

In June, Andrews publishes an article in The New York Times titled “On Understanding Black Art.” This article is, in part, a response to a story by Hilton Kramer published in the paper earlier this month, a major review of the exhibition Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Kramer praises certain aspects of the “Black” exhibition while making some controversial statements about the singularity of the show and the insignificance of less “mainstream” artists. Andrews, in his article, contests these opinions and shares his own emotional response to select works in the exhibition.

Also in the summer, Andrews publishes an article titled “The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (B.E.C.C.)” in Arts Magazine.

1971    

In January, MoMA acquires the painting No More Games (1970) for its permanent collection. Jennifer Licht, Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, had seen the work during a studio visit with Andrews in December 1970. Over the summer, the painting is included in The Artist as Adversary, a monumental exhibition comprising over 400 works addressing social and political concerns and featuring Jacob Lawrence’s entire Migration Series (1940-41). The exhibition press release describes the show as one that “brings together from the Museum's own collections a large body of work in which the state of the world, political and military institutions and events, social injustices, constitute the subject matter.” Andrews is listed as one of the “younger artists represented who also deal with the theme of the oppression of the black man in America.”[9]

Contemporary Black Artists in America opens at the Whitney Museum in April; approximately fifteen artists withdraw from the show before it opens to protest the absence of African Americans from the Whitney’s curatorial staff. Andrews participates in a rebuttal exhibition held at Acts of Art Gallery, consisting of work by artists who refused to exhibit in the Whitney show (Rebuttal to Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal, April 6 - May 10, 1971).

In March, Andrews also participates in a panel discussion about the rebuttal, titled “The Black Artist” and organized by Richard Mayhew, held at the Art Students League. Art historian Oakley N. Holmes produces a 45-minute film documenting the panel, showing Andrews and other participating artists including Vivian Browne, Edmund B. Gaither (b.1944), Faith Ringgold, Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), and Alvin Hollingsworth (1928-2000).

A photograph of Andrews appears in a New York Times article about the controversy over the exhibition (Grace Glueck, “Black Show Under Fire at the Whitney,” January 31, 1971). The photograph of Andrews is accompanied by the caption: “Artist Benny Andrews of the BECC; Urging a ‘massive boycott’ of the Whitney.” Whitney director John I.H. Baur appears in a photograph below, with caption “Defending the concept of a black show.”

The first works of Andrews’ Bicentennial Series are exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem in a show titled Benny Andrews: Symbols and Other Works; museum director Ed Spriggs writes the catalogue.

In November, Andrews teaches an art class at the Manhattan Detention Complex (also known as The Tombs), the first class of what will become a major nationwide prison art program initiated under the auspices of the BECC. The program had arisen in response to major riots at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York earlier this year, when Andrews and his BECC affiliates are stirred by the prisoners’ demands for rights and justice. In the years that follow, the BECC’s Prison Arts Programs will grow exponentially and expand into twenty states. The New York Times publishes an article about Andrews’ first class, including a photograph of Andrews in the classroom at the Detention center, in its November 16 issue. In 1976, Andrews will publish a first-person account of this first class, along with a summary of the program and guidelines for implementation, in an issue of Art Workers News.

A solo exhibition of Andrews’ paintings and drawings opens at Wabash College in Crawford, IN, and travels to Spelman College in Atlanta, GA and Talladega College in Talladega, AR.

1972    

ACA Galleries, New York, exhibits Trash (1971), Andrews’ second work in the Bicentennial Series. Curator Edmund B. Gaither writes an essay to accompany the exhibition. The large, multi-panel work will later become part of the permanent collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Andrews is included in the Black American Experiences show at the Oakland Museum, California, and his paintings become eligible for purchase by the American Academy of Arts and Letters through the Childe Hassam Fund.

With Jim Fisher, Andrews establishes a college seminar program that takes students from Queens College into New York City’s detention centers to teach.

Following the inmate uprising in Attica Correctional Facility in September of 1971, Andrews collaborates with artist Rudolf Baranik (1920-1998) on The Attica Book. Proceeds from the book go to the BECC prison art program. The book, described by Andrews in the editor’s note as “a collage of indignation, witnessing the communality of America’s artists speaking for shared truth,” also included poetry and other writings by incarcerated people that had participated in earlier prison-based BECC workshops.[10]

In April, Andrews is a guest on the CBS television program Black Arts.

Alice Neel completes the painting Benny and Mary Ellen Andrews, which will enter MoMA’s permanent collection in 1988. She creates a lithograph portrait, Benny Andrews, in 1978. Andrews will create a large collaged Portrait of Alice Neel in 1985, and makes other drawings and paintings of Neel throughout that decade.

1973    

Circle (1971), Andrews’ third work in the Bicentennial Series, is exhibited at the ACA Galleries, New York. He has solo exhibitions at the Afro-American Cultural Center at the American International College in Springfield, MA and at the Aronson Gallery in Atlanta, GA.

Andrews and his BECC co-chairman Cliff Joseph (b.1922), along with Rudolf Baranik and artist Irving Petlin (1934-2018), publish a letter to the editors in the June issue of Artforum in which they demand that the Attica Book be brought to the public. Specifically, they repeat their demand made to MoMA that the book be sold in its bookstore. Andrews and his co-authors explain in the letter that the “painfully timely book-art-portfolio stirred the conscience and raised the hope in the fight against in justice both on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’...except in the leading art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art. ...as artists we must protest the indifference and servility of a public institution which rightfully should represent us.”[11]

The March-April issue of Art in America includes an article, “Art from the Inside,” which discusses the origins, details, and successes of prison art programs. Author Alexandra C. Anderson includes a statement from Andrews, recognizing his significant role in such programs in New York: “The Prison Art Program serves as an instrument to bridge the gap between the free and the incarcerated. It includes art instruction, various informative discussions about current activities in the art world and a chance to exchange ideas and experience. The communication that takes place between us (the artists) and the inmates really transcends teaching art: it becomes a human exchange experience, and our being artists quickly becomes secondary.” The article also highlights the BECC and the group’s efforts to support and educate inmates and ex-prisoners across New York’s boroughs.[12]

Andrews receives a fellowship to spend two months at the MacDowell Colony (now MacDowell) in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he creates several studies for Sexism (1973), the fourth work in his Bicentennial Series.[13]

The City of New York honors Andrews for his work in the prison system with a Certificate of Merit presented by Mayor John Lindsay.

On September 26, Blacks: USA, 1973 opens at the New York Cultural Center. Andrews is the guest curator, and includes some of his own drawings and painting-collages in the exhibition. The show receives an ambivalent review in The New York Times; critic Hilton Kramer calls the exhibition “eclectic.”

In May, public radio host Ruth Bowman interviews Andrews for WNYC’s Views on Art program. In the interview, Andrews discusses his recent Bicentennial Series installation at ACA Galleries (1972), the challenges he faces when making paintings, his work as a professor at Queens College, and his establishment of the arts education program in the New York state prison system. The interview is archived,  later to be published and maintained online as part of the New York Public Radio Archives Collection.[14]

1974    

Andrews takes a position as a visiting critic at Yale University, is awarded a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, and receives a second MacDowell Fellowship.

A documentary titled The 24-Hour Life of Benny Andrews (John Wise, Nafarsi Productions) is screened at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Andrews is also featured in the film All Things Human, produced by Queens College.

Sexism (1973) is shown in the Brooklyn Museum’s 19th Annual Print Exhibition.

Encore, a national magazine dedicated to issues concerning Black Americans, hires Andrews as associate editor of art criticism.

1975    

A solo show of Andrews’ Bicentennial Series opens at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by curator Lawrence Alloway. The exhibition features four works from the series—Symbols (1970), Trash (1971), Circle (1972), and Sexism (1973)—as well as oil and pen-and-ink studies. The Bicentennial Series travels to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Dorchester, MA. Andrews appears on the WABC-TV program AM New York to talk about the series.

At the same time, War (1974), the fifth installment of the Bicentennial Series premieres at the ACA Galleries while Utopias (1975), the sixth work, is included in the group exhibition Jubilee, curated by Edmund B. Gaither for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Andrews has solo exhibitions at the Gallery 7 in Detroit, MI; Spelman College in Atlanta, GA; Pennsylvania State University in University Park, PA; the Craftery Gallery in Hartford, CT; the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; the Aronson Gallery in Atlanta, GA; and the Gallery of Sarasota in Sarasota, FL.

In May, the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota presents a one-day program of “Black American Art and Music” which showcases Black artists including Andrews, Romare Bearden, Orton Graves, and Mildred Thompson (1936-2003). Collages by Andrews are highlighted in a gallery exhibition accompanying the lively program, and the St. Petersburg Times features Andrews in its review of the event. 

Andrews receives his third MacDowell Fellowship. During his first three residencies at MacDowell (1973, 1974, 1975), Andrews is immersed in The Bicentennial Series. While at MacDowell, Benny works in one of the 32 studios known as Cheney Studio, a low, shingled bungalow with wide porches and a unique brick fireplace. Other fellows to work in Cheney include novelist and playwright DuBose Heyward, historian Barbara Tuchman, and artists Richard Haas (b.1936) and John Kelly (b.1959).

In June, Andrews is interviewed for Ataraxia, a literary magazine edited by Phil Williams and Linda R. Williams and published in Madison, GA. The interview is published in an issue dedicated entirely to Andrews. It also includes reproductions of his work, extracts from his unpublished autobiography, and writing by family members. 

The annual special issue of Black Creations (vol. 6) features “The Big Bash,” an article by Andrews in which he uses a party metaphor to describe the “surrealistic nightmare” Black artists experience in an art world where they are invited to the party, but not given full access to its delights. Furthermore, he points out, they are expected to be grateful for this second-rate treatment. 

Anthony Barboza (b.1944), an African American photographer committed to recording Black life, completes a portrait photograph of Andrews. Like many of Barboza’s portraits of notable Black cultural figures, the portrait shows Andrews in a candid pose. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, will later have this portrait photograph in its permanent collection.

1976    

In January, Andrews pickets the Whitney Museum’s John D. Rockefeller III Exhibition of American Artists exhibition, which purports to offer 300 years of American art, but has no Black artists and only one (White) woman artist in the show. The protests are organized by the Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, an umbrella organization that includes members of the BECC. Andrews is also involved in the publication of the committee’s An Anti-Catalogue, which includes copies of protest letters and petitions sent to the Whitney. 

Andrews serves as a guest curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, organizing an exhibition of artwork by prisoners titled Echoes: Prisons, USA—1976.

He is chosen to become a member of the MacDowell Fellows Committee and the advisory board of the National Center of Afro-American Artists. The Studio Museum in Harlem selects him to join the museum’s curatorial council, and he serves on the Alternative Spaces panel for the NEA.

Andrews becomes the art coordinator for the Inner City Roundtable of Youths (ICRY)—an organization founded in 1975 and comprised of gang members in the New York metropolitan area who seek to combat youth violence by strengthening urban communities.

In February, Lerner-Heller Gallery presents an exhibition of Andrews’ works on paper featuring studies for selections from the Bicentennial Series. The show is written up in The New Yorker, The New York Times and Arts Magazine.

Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at the Afro-American Cultural Center at the American International College in Springfield, MA; the Gallery of Sarasota in Sarasota, FL; and the Craftery Gallery in Hartford, CT. He also has a solo exhibition to inaugurate the opening of the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center in Madison, GA.

James Van Der Zee (1886-1993), one of the most distinctive American portrait photographers, creates a portrait of Andrews. The portrait comprises noticeable features of Van Der Zee’s earlier Harlem photographs; Andrews’ eyes have been touched up with increased contrast, and non-existent jewelry has been added by Van Der Zee. Aside from Andrews’ contemporary clothing, the portrait photograph is reminiscent of Van Der Zee’s signature photographs documenting the Harlem Renaissance.[15]

1977    

The Bicentennial Series is shown at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita, KS; Dr. Milton Ratner donates the work Symbols (1970) to the museum.

War Study #5 (1974) is purchased by the New York State Office of General Services for the permanent collection of the newly constructed Harlem State Office Building (now the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office Building). Known as the Harlem Art Collection, the collection consists of over 100 pieces from about 65 artists and is currently housed in Albany, NY. The National Academy of Art acquires the oil collage Shades (1977) through the Childe Hassam Fund.

Andrews’ work is included in the Tenth International Print Biennial Exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan, where he receives the Ohara Museum Prize for the work From Home (1975).

Pelham-Stoffler Gallery in Houston, TX, presents a show of paintings by Andrews alongside works by Andrews’ friend and fellow activist-artist May Stevens (1924-2019).

Andrews joins the Visual Arts Policy Panel of the NEA. Along with other the other panelists - esteemed art world professionals including Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Anne d’Harnoncourt, photography book editor Carole Kismarie, and environmental artist Newton Harrison (b.1932) - Andrews is responsible for reviewing policies of the NEA Visual Arts Program, reporting on conditions in the field, and suggestion revisions to current program activities. Panelist membership is determined by a set of criteria as listed by the NEA: broad and substantial knowledge of contemporary American art, experience in the field, geographic area, judiciousness, peer respect, and broad and inclusive aesthetic position.

On a trip across the United States, Andrews spends time in Colorado and Arizona. In Houston, Texas, Andrews visits artist John Biggers (1924-2001), who is now head of the Art Department at Texas Southern University.

Back in New York, Andrews joins in protests against a proposal by the Board of Directors of The Studio Museum to move it out of Harlem. Now directing the ICRY Art Program, Andrews organizes a Youth Day exhibition at the Harlem State Office Building with works by members of the ICRY.

Andrews illustrates poet Ronald King’s autobiography and begins a series of drawings and works on paper for his brother Raymond’s first novel, Appalachee Red.

1978    

Andrews works on the Women I’ve Known series and joins the Lerner-Heller Gallery, which exhibits the series. Select small paintings from this show are included in a solo exhibition at Adley Gallery, Sarasota, FL, in the spring. Additional one-man shows this year include an exhibition of drawings for Raymond Andrews’ Appalachee Red at the Handshake Gallery in Atlanta and Benny Andrews/Matrix 42 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Andrews’ exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum is part of the museum’s MATRIX program, a changing series of contemporary art exhibitions that was initially funded in 1974 as an experimental pilot project with a grant from the NEA.[16]

Having received his fourth fellowship, Andrews spends three months at The MacDowell Colony (now MacDowell), where he meets sculptor and MacDowell fellow Nene Humphrey (b.1947). The artists form an immediate friendship, and Andrews creates a portrait of her.

A collection of Andrews writing and line drawings entitled Between the Lines: 70 Drawings and 7 Essays is published. Andrews’ essays such as “Understanding Black Art,” “The Big Bash,” and “The Whitney Takes a Step Back” address the role of Black artists and critique the artworld’s systemic racism.   The preface is written by Alice Neel.

Appalachee Red is published by Dial Press.

1979    

Early in the year, Appalachee Red receives the first James Baldwin Prize for fiction. Andrews attends the award ceremony for his brother at the New York headquarters of Dial Press (Baldwin’s publisher), where James Baldwin personally presents the award to Raymond. Both brothers, along with their family, are deeply moved by the honor.

Andrews shows Women I’ve Known, Part II in a solo exhibition at Lerner-Heller Gallery. He has additional solo shows at the Selma Burke Art Center, Pittsburgh, PA; Mississippi Valley State University, Greenville, MS; Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN; and The Phoenix Arts and Theater Company, Atlanta, GA.

Andrews’ painting The Bath (1976) is included in 100 Artists 100 Years: Alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The centennial exhibition for the School is held at the Art Institute of Chicago and guest curated by art critic and former Art Institute curator Katharine Kuh. Andrews attends the opening reception.

1980    

Six Black Artists—a group exhibition of works by Andrews, Richard Hunt (b.1935), Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Betye Saar, and Sam Gilliam (b.1933)—opens at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.

Andrews creates a ninety-five foot long mural, Flight (1980), for Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport as part of a wider project that features murals by thirteen other artists including Sam Gilliam and David Hammons (b.1943). Works related to the mural are shown in a solo exhibition, Benny Andrews: Flight at Lerner-Heller Gallery. The show is reviewed in the March issue of ARTnews.

Andrews has solo exhibitions at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, which shows a number of recent works;  The AAMARP Gallery (Afro-American Master Artist in Residence Program), Boston, MA; Fine Art Center Gallery of the State University of Stony Brook, NY, which shows works from the Bicentennial Series; and Douglas High School Gallery, Atlanta, GA.

In a special summer issue of Art Journal - the quarterly journal of art, visual culture, theory, and criticism, published by the College Art Association - titled “Command Performance,” Andrews is one of nineteen artists invited by guest editor Alessandra Comini and the editorial board to contribute an idea for a “fantasy exhibition.” Andrews proposes American Art of the Past Twenty Years: A Wonderful Potpourri of Styles and Sources, about which he writes: “The goal of this exhibition would be to share the artists' experiences, visions, and dreams with the public. In order for that to happen, all the present day powers in the art world would have to be excluded from the entire organization and selection processes. In fact, I'd favor sending curators, art dealers, art historians, and other experts on a cruise around the world, allowing them to return to this country only on the opening night of the exhibition. The exhibition would take place all over America. While I'd like to see certain artists selected as representatives of certain styles, a great deal of emphasis would be placed on the areas of American life in which the ideas for those styles originated.”[17]

In October, Andrews participates in his first Artists Talk on Art panel, which is titled “The only good artist is a dead artist (or) The myth of the great artist” and moderated by feminist art historian Carol Duncan. Andrews joins artists Leon Golub (1922-2004), Will Insley (1929-2011), Marjorie Strider (1931-2014), and others on the panel. Since its beginning in January 1975, Artists Talk on Art will continue as the art world's longest-running, most prolific and ongoing aesthetic panel discussion series featuring thousands of artists, critics, historians, and art dealers. Andrews will participate in a number of such panels throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Towards the end of the year, Andrews and Mary Ellen Andrews sign a separation agreement.

1981

In November, Lerner-Heller Gallery opens Still Lifes, the first solo exhibition of Andrews’ still lifes. Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at Firehouse Gallery, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA; CRT Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT; and Wendell St. Gallery, Cambridge MA.

1982    

The Newark Museum, New Jersey buys Andrews’ Golden Still Life (1981) for their collection.

Andrews takes a leave of absence from his teaching position at Queens College in order to become Director of the Visual Arts Program for the NEA. He oversees a program budget of approximately $6.5 million in public funds to be dispersed to artists and arts organizations nationwide.

In the summer, Nene Humphrey and Andrews set off for Europe. They travel throughout England, Holland, France and Germany, visiting museums and working. Andrews is especially interested in Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer, and other Dutch masters. In France, the artists travel to Vence, where each has a fellowship at the Michael Karolyi Foundation.

Upon his return from Europe, Andrews begins working full time for the NEA. He quickly becomes a vital presence in Washington, DC, with a solo exhibition at Nyangoma Gallery and a proclamation from Mayor Marion Barry for Accomplishment in the Arts. Andrews is quoted in a July 1983 issue of Black Enterprise magazine commenting on the vitality of the arts in Washington, DC.

In September, Benny Andrews: Retrospective opens at the California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture, Los Angeles, guest curated by Lowery Stokes Sims.

Andrews has solo exhibitions at The Albany Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA; the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA; the Pine Bluff Art Center, Pine Bluff, AR;  and the Library of Port Washington, Port Washington, NY.

1983    

As Director of the NEA Visual Arts Program, Andrews initiates a project to get health insurance for people working in the arts.

Andrews’ solo exhibition Benny Andrews: 25 Years of Drawing opens at the Glass Gallery, New York, NY. He also has solo exhibitions at Sid Deutsh Gallery in New York, NY and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Savannah, GA.

Andrews donates all of his archival material on Black artists, the BECC, and other and Black artist organizations to The Studio Museum in Harlem. 

Dial Press publishes Baby Sweets by Raymond Andrews, featuring cover art and illustrations by Benny Andrews.

In April, Andrews participates in an Artists Talk on Art panel titled “Art & Art Criticism: Criteria for the '80s.” Art historian and critic Irving Sandler moderates, and Andrews is the sole artist on the panel. He is joined by Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy, publisher Abe Lubelski, Arts Magazine editor Richard Martin, and critics Donald Kuspit and Joseph Mascheck. Andrews recounts the event in his journal, noting that the panel attracted a crowd of close to 500 people. Having been called in last minute as a substitute for famously controversial New York Times critic Hilton Kramer, Andrews recalls, “to my surprise, I was able to make points and respond intelligently, and in the end I feel I represented the artists whom I tried to speak about very well. ...it was a nice and productive night.”

1984    

The Critic's Fellowships in the NEA’s Visual Arts program is suspended, and Andrews eventually leaves the NEA. A few months later, the United States and France sign an agreement for an artist exchange program, one of Andrews’ ideas during his tenure at the NEA.

In April, Andrews participates in another Artists Talk on Art panel moderated by Irving Sandler, titled “Pity the poor art critic.” He is joined by critics and writers John Perreault, Corinne Robins, and Kim Levin.

That summer, he and Humphrey pack for a camping trip in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. During the trip, they draw, read, and sightsee.

Andrews installs artwork at the Plainview Baptist Church in his native Morgan County, Georgia.

The traveling exhibition Icons and Images in the Work of Benny Andrews opens at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, AL. The show is curated by Janet Heit and circulated by the Southern Arts Federation. Raymond Andrews writes the introduction to the catalogue.

Andrews has solo exhibitions of recent works at Gallery Two Nine One, Atlanta, GA, and Merida Gallery, Louisville, KY.

1985    

In January, Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973, curated by Mary Schmidt Campbell, opens at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition features 150 works by fifty-five different artists, including Andrews, and addresses the relationship between art and activism by presenting works that recapture the period of intense social upheaval and the spirited civil rights movement in the 1960s. Andrews originally conceived of the idea for the show, sharing his concept with Campbell, who will later recall: “Benny Andrews, an artist who became very well-known during that period, came to me with the idea that there were a large number of artists, both Black and White, who had produced some rather extraordinary images during the `60s. And, the thinking went, these images came about because the artist had been catalyzed by the events of the period.” Andrews contributes the preface and an essay to the exhibition catalogue. His chapter contribution, “A Black Artist’s View of Artistic and Political Activism, 1963–1973,” comprises excerpts from his journal in which he recounts the birth of the BECC and the struggle by Black artists for recognition by mainstream institutions.

In February, Andrews participates in a panel discussion at The Studio Museum in connection with Tradition and Conflict, “The Civil Rights Movement in Retrospect: Artists and Activists Remember.” The panel is moderated by African Studies scholar Dr. James Turner and includes Andrews, civil rights activist Julian Bond, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Faith Ringgold. Andrews’ integral role in the exhibition epitomizes Campbell’s assertion that “this exhibit shows that there are many things that can impassion an artist. The enormous changes going on in this country at that time not only made artists want to respond; it was almost as if they had to respond.”[18]

A review in The New York Times praises Tradition and Conflict as “one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever mounted” at The Studio Museum.[19] The exhibition travels to multiple venues nationwide over the next two years.

Art is a Family Affair opens at SUNY Purchase. It is the first large-scale exhibition of work by multiple members of the Andrews family. Benny Andrews’ work is shown alongside that of his parents—George and Viola—his brother Raymond, and his sons, Thomas and Christopher.

The solo exhibition Icons and Images in the Work of Benny Andrews travels to the Waterworks Gallery, Salisbury, NC; the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA; and the Memphis Brooks Art Museum; Memphis, TN.

Andrews’ solo exhibition Benny Andrews: Completing the Circle, opens at Armstrong Gallery in New York. Andrews’ paintings and sculptures in this show are inspired by his time working in Washington, DC and his interest in the city’s planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant. They depict three imagined monumental sculptures to complement the Washington Monument.

The National Council of Arts Administrators honors Andrews for “making a major contribution to the arts in America” with a presentation in Atlanta.

Andrews is a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he completes two offset lithographs. Editions of these prints will later be donated by Brandywine to local institutions, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Andrews will be invited to return to Brandywine under the visiting artist program in 1994.

1986    

In January, the solo exhibition Benny Andrews: Completing the Circle of L'Enfant's Washington, D.C. opens at the Stanback Museum and Planetarium at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, SC. Andrews visits the campus to give a lecture to students and the public. He has additional solo exhibitions of mixed media work at the Urban League Gallery and The Works Gallery, both in Newark, NJ.

Ebony lists Andrews as one of “Fifteen Leading Black Artists” in its May issue. Others include Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), Martin Puryear (b.1941) and Jacob Lawrence.

Andrews and Humphrey are married on June 14 on the roof garden at 130 West 26th Street. Soon after, they leave for a two-month trip to Europe.

In November, Andrews participates in an Artists Talk on Art panel, “Artist as Collector,” moderated by artist Elliott Barowitz (b.1936), along with artist panelists Keith Newhouse, Jacqueline Conderacci (b.1953), and Jessie Gifford (b.1939).

On December 6, Portraits of . . ., a solo exhibition of Andrews’ work, opens at the Armstrong Gallery, New York; the works later travel to the Craftery Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut.

Working on a new series titled Southland, Andrews travels south to his studio in Georgia, located on Morton Road - 15 miles outside of Athens and 10 miles from his hometown of Madison. Throughout the years, Andrews will return to this studio in summers and during university vacations.

1987    

Andrews is named the first distinguished Martin Luther King Jr.-César Chávez-Rosa Parks Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Founded in 1986 by the Michigan state legislature, the King-Chávez-Parks program seeks to increase the number of minority instructors in the classroom and provide role models for minority students, with aims to stem the downward spiral of college graduation rates for students economically and academically disadvantaged in postsecondary education.

In the spring, Andrews is elected to the Board of Directors of The MacDowell Colony (now MacDowell).

Andrews has solo exhibitions at Isobel Neal Gallery, Chicago, IL; the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, GA; and at Gallery Two Nine One in Atlanta, where he presents his Southland series. Elsewhere in Georgia, he is in group exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens and the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center in Madison. Work by Andrews is also included in the exhibition Georgia Artists: State Collection, which visits Sope Creek Elementary School in Marietta, GA. Traveling through the state on a school bus, this exhibition is one of three traveling shows available to schools and communities as part of the Georgia Art Bus Program organized by the Georgia Council for the Arts. The Council, formerly known as the Georgia Commission on the Arts, founded the Georgia Art Bus Program in 1969 to purchase and exhibit the work of living Georgia artists and make their work accessible to children and the public around the state.

In October, Andrews participates in an Artists Talk on Art panel titled “What makes you think you're an artist?,” moderated by artist Terry Fugate-Wilcox (b.1944). Andrews is joined by an array of artists, designers, dealers, and critics.

In the fall, Andrews and Humphrey spend five weeks at the Bellagio Foundation in Italy as Rockefeller Fellows. Andrews works on his Portrait Series. 

1988    

Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art opens at MoMA; two of Andrews’ prints are included.

Portraits Of . . . opens at the High Museum’s satellite location at the Georgia-Pacific Center Gallery in downtown Atlanta, and Andrews gives a lecture there called “So You Want to Be an Artist?” He also delivers a lecture at the High Museum, “The Americanization of Art: Regionalism to Nationalism.”

Andrews has solo exhibitions at the Adirondack Community College Visual Arts Gallery in Queensbury, NY; and at the Art Gallery at Lazarus Downtown, a department store, in Columbus, OH.

Romare Bearden dies on March 12; Andrews participates in his memorial service at Nassau Community College in East Garden, New York.

On April 1, The Artist's Mother: Portraits and Homages opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; Andrews’ Portrait of Viola Andrews (1986) is included in the group exhibition. Later, Andrews gives a lecture at the Portrait Gallery titled, “The Mother as the Member of the Family of Subjects.”

American Artist magazine publishes a feature article on Andrews in its April issue. Written by award-winning art critic and journalist Judd Tully, the article includes several color reproductions of Andrews’ paintings and collages and praises Andrews’ work as an arts administrator, lecturer, and artist.

On September 18, The Collages of Benny Andrews, a solo exhibition guest curated by Donald Kuspit, opens at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Janitors at Rest is one of the 23 collages shown. The exhibition receives an admiring review in The New York Times.

Andrews attends his first Board of Directors Meeting at the Sculpture Center in New York. He is also elected to the Board of Directors of the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Georgia.

1989

The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires Andrews’ American Gothic (1971), following the work’s inclusion in the Collages exhibition at The Studio Museum.

In April, Artforum publishes a favorable review of Andrews’ solo exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta. This is Andrews’ first review in the magazine.

Andrews has additional solo shows at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, Danville, VA; Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Sherry Washington Fine Arts, Detroit, MI; Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA; and Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN.

In the September issue of Art in America, famed critic Holland Cotter writes a glowing review of Andrews’ 1988 Collages exhibition at The Studio Museum. Cotter commends Andrews’ combination of mixed media collage with painting, complimenting his expressive figuration for its integration of a “formal sophistication with a folk-art directness.”

1990    

On February 18, The Andrews Family of Morgan County Georgia opens at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, a joint project with the Uncle Remus Regional Library System of Morgan County, in Madison, Georgia. The exhibition comprises two shows in Madison - Recent Works by Benny and George Andrews at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, and Arts, Letters & Andrews Family Memorabilia at the Morgan County Library - in addition to multiple events of music, lectures, and readings.

In March, Andrews participates in an Artists Talk on Art panel, “The function of art vs. the artist's responsibility”, moderated by poet and artist Albert Dépas. In his journal, Andrews recalls that the panel went more poorly than planned because critic Hilton Kramer, originally listed as a panelist, didn’t show. 

The group exhibition Black USA opens at Museum Overholland in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in April. In addition to Andrews, the show includes Bill Traylor (c.1853-1949), Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Martin Puryear, David Hammons, Nathaniel Hunter Jr. (1939-2009) and Jules Allen (b.1947). Works by Andrews are reproduced on exhibition posters advertising the show.

Andrews sits on a panel to select MacDowell’s visual art medalist. Soon after, he is elected to the Executive Committee of the MacDowell Board of Directors

On July 21, Andrews begins working on The America Series.

On September 23, Folk: The Art of Benny and George Andrews opens at the Memphis Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The exhibition will travel to six additional venues.

Andrews has several solo shows throughout the country. Venues include the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS; Ratner Gallery, Chicago, IL; Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, NY; McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI; The Gallery at COCA, St. Louis, MO; Gwinnett Council for the Arts Gallery, Lawrenceville, GA; and The Gallery, Fine Arts Hall, Columbus College  (now Columbus State University), Columbus, GA. In October, Andrews gives a lecture at Columbus College in connection with his show.

Peachtree Publishers release Raymond Andrews’ book The Last Radio Baby, featuring cover art and drawings by Benny Andrews. 

Andrews serves as the sole juror for the Washington State Art Council Western Artists Competition.

The American Academy of Art purchases Rows from here to Eternity (1989) and donates it to the Fine Arts Museum of the South (now known as Mobile Museum of Art) in Mobile, AL.

1991    

In March, Andrews is named “Georgia Artist of the Year” by the Georgia Art Education Association.

A family group exhibition, Art and Literature by the Andrews: Benny, George, Viola, Christopher, Thomas, and Raymond, opens at the Alma Simmons Memorial Art Gallery, Frederick Douglass High School, Atlanta, GA. The gallery is known for bringing important exhibitions of works by emerging and established artists to students and the public. The exhibition is reviewed in the Atlanta-based international art journal Art Papers, a well-established periodical interested in connecting the local arts community to the global art world.

The Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS, purchases Portrait of Viola Andrews (1986) for its permanent collection. In the fall, the painting is on view at the museum as part of the exhibition Folk: The Art of Benny & George Andrews, which travels to multiple venues throughout the South, Midwest and California.

Andrew has solo exhibitions at Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA; McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and at Rutledge Gallery II, Winthrop College, Rock Hill, SC.

Andrews participates in a group exhibition at USSR Artist Union/Kudnetshy Mmost Hall, Moscow, Russia.

In November, Raymond Andrews commits suicide. In December, the family gathers at Andrews’ Athens, Georgia studio, where they plant a tree and spread Raymond’s ashes.

1992    

Andrews presents a preview of The America Series in a solo exhibition at the Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, NY. He has a solo show of new work at Susan Conway Galleries, Washington, DC.

Andrews and Humphrey travel to Palo Alto, California on a two-week fellowship at the Smith-Anderson Gallery print workshop.

The America Series opens on April 30 at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California, with a catalogue and essay by New York Times art critic William Zimmer. The series will travel to the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton (1993); the Fine Arts Museum in Mobile, Alabama (1993); and the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock (1994). Andrews writes an artist statement for the show, which opens: “Long before I started the actual work on the series, America, I knew that one day I'd do it. All the works I'd been doing up to the actual beginning of the series were, in a sense, mini-Americas. Why? Because all of my work is of and about America, or as seen through an American's eyes.”[20]

Andrews’ Portrait of Viola Andrews (1986) is featured on the cover of the June/July issue of American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture. The accompanying article is by William Zimmer, adapted from his essay for the America Series exhibition catalogue.

The Georgia State Council on the Arts honors Andrews for his contribution to the arts with a dinner party and an installation of Andrews’ works at the Georgia Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta.

On November 3, Andrews travels to Japan for a week in connection with the group exhibition, Dream Singers, Story Tellers, and African-American Presence, at the Fukui Museum, Tokyo. The show visits two additional venues in Japan before traveling to the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton the following year.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters purchases The Oath (1992) and donates it to the Columbus Museum in Georgia.

1993    

In February, Andrews is the featured artist at the Dr. Alain Locke Benefit at Sherry Washington Gallery in Detroit, an event hosted by the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Friends of African and African American Art. The evening also serves as an opening for his solo exhibition at the gallery. In connection with the honor, Andrews presents a lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts on the day following the benefit.

Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at the Museum of African-American Art, Tampa, FL; McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA; and Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.

On May 17, The Studio Museum in Harlem honors Andrews as its Artist of the Year. Previous recipients of the award include Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, William T. Williams (b.1942), Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett, and Betye Saar.

1994

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery mounts its first survey of historical works by African American artists; African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks, which includes two paintings by Andrews: Oedipus Rex (1964) and Wounded Sergeant (1970). The  exhibition becomes an annual for ten consecutive years and Andrews is featured in all ten exhibitions. 

In January, Andrews is honored as a “Legend” artist as part of the Twelfth Annual Artist’s Salute to Black History Month exhibition at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles. He is featured along with artists Charles White (1918-1979), Samella Lewis (b.1924), and Claude Clark, Sr. (1915-2001).

Andrews’ War Baby (1968) is included in the traveling exhibition As Seen by Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the War, which opens at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam early this year following a three-year tour through the United States.

Andrews has solo exhibitions at Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA; McIntosh Gallery, Atlanta, GA; and Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT. At the Craftery Gallery he shows his Cruelty and Sorrow series, which partially came from the grief he experienced upon his brother Raymond’s death. On the occasion of the exhibition, Andrews says in regards to the series, “All of us have sorrow. When I do something like this, I want to hit the viewer with feeling. If you don’t generate feeling, you’re just an illustrator, you’re just projecting a cardboard image. Feeling is what it’s all about. If people don’t get a feeling from art, it doesn’t work from them.”[21]

The spring 1994 issue of Art Journal prints a 1991 interview between Benny Andrews and his father, George. In the introduction, Benny describes George as “one of the most tenacious and imaginative persons I’ve ever met. He’s a personification of the mythical artist/poet who sees beauty through every pore, who is driven to create regardless of the circumstances.”

In the fall, Andrews is a Visiting Artist for a second time at the Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia. He produces two more prints, editions from which will later be donated by Brandywine to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

In September, Andrews is awarded Brandywine’s James Van Der Zee Award, which is granted annually to distinguished African American artists, aged 60 or older, to recognize creativity and contributions to the advancement of young artists. Multimedia artist Camille Billops (1933-2019) also receives the award this year.

1995    

The Brandywine Workshop mounts a solo exhibition of Andrews’ prints, Benny Andrews: Chronicles and Recollections, at its Printed Image Gallery in Philadelphia. The exhibition travels to Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA.

Several museums and galleries nationwide present solo exhibitions of Andrews’ work. The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, OH, exhibits thirty-six drawings by Andrews in its Print Gallery. The Tubman African American Museum (now The Tubman Museum) in Macon, GA, presents a show titled Homecoming by Benny Andrews. The Revival Series is shown at Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY; and Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI. Andrews has exhibitions at Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and Bomani Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Benny Andrews: People, a solo exhibition curated by Jane Farver, opens at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, in May. Andrews receives the Queens Museum of Art 1995 Arts Achievement Award.

In November, the retrospective Benny Andrews: Thirty-Five Years of Selected Works opens at the African American Cultural Center Gallery in the Witherspoon Student Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

At the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, Andrews lectures on his work. Later, he is given a key to the city of Hartford, and Connecticut governor John Rowland proclaims February 11th Benny Andrews Day.

The High Museum in Atlanta purchases Revival Meeting (1994) for its permanent collection. The work will be exhibited immediately the following year, featuring prominently in an exhibition from the High’s permanent collection in celebration of Black History Month.

In April, Andrews is interviewed by Artists Talk on Art co-founder Lori Antonacci as part of a weekly artist interview series. Andrews writes in his journal that he presents slides of his Cruelty and Sorrow Series, before having a “very good exchange with Antonacci on a broad range of topics. There was a good and receptive audience.”

In October, Andrews is awarded The Coca-Cola Company Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Leadership at a black-tie event to celebrate the second annual Atlanta Arts and Business Awards (known as the “Abby” Awards).

1996    

On January 11, George Andrews dies in a hospital in Athens after suffering a series of heart attacks.

In February, Andrews attends a reception at ACA Galleries, New York, for a group show that includes Romare Bearden, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, Barkley Hendricks (1945-2017) and Faith Ringgold. The event is a star-studded party, organized by the Daily News and Black Entertainment Television to celebrate the launch of their new joint publication, BET Weekend Magazine. Andrews writes about the evening in his journal, recalling the crowded function and the appearance of movie stars and record company executives. Actor Denzel Washington is among those celebrities who attend the reception.

Cruelty and Sorrow Series is shown at the Diggs Gallery of Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina. The gallery simultaneously presents a solo exhibition of works by George Andrews.

McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta presents a solo exhibition of Andrews’ Music Series, with a neighboring exhibition of works by George and Thomas Andrews. This special “Three Generations of Artists” presentation is timed to coincide with the Summer Olympic Games held in Atlanta. In Philadelphia, Andrews has a solo exhibition at Gross-McLeaf Gallery.

Andrews’ Portrait of George C. Andrews (1986) is included in a centennial exhibition of MacDowell artist

fellows at the Currier Gallery of Art (now Currier Museum of Art) in Manchester, NH. The show travels to the National Academy of Design, New York, and the Wichita Museum of Art, Wichita, KS.

Benny Andrews: The Visible Man, a documentary directed and written by David Irving and produced by Linda Freeman (L&S Video, Inc.), is released. Actor Geoffrey Holder narrates, and the documentary features Morris Museum of Art director J. Richard Gruber, Queens Museum curator Jane Farver, curator Deirdre Bibby and art critics Michael Brenson and William Zimmer.

1997    

On January 28, a representative from Simon and Shuster’s children's books division visits Andrews to look at works for a book titled Sky Sash So Blue, which is scheduled to be published in the spring of 1998.

ACA Galleries, New York, mounts a solo exhibition titled Works from the Music, Revival, and Langston Hughes Series. Bill Hodges Gallery presents Benny Andrews: Selections from a Life in Art, which is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with an essay by Jane Farver. Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, LA; and at the Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC, where his show is the inaugural exhibition for the newly opened gallery.

Andrews is elected to membership at the National Academy of Design, New York.

On September 4, American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997 opens at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia. This major retrospective exhibition is accompanied by a monograph of the same title by J. Richard Gruber.

1998

Andrews is invited by the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation Center in Watkinsville, Georgia, to present a solo exhibition in support of the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee. The Committee is a biracial group dedicated to revealing the truth about the lynching of four young Black people on the nearby Moore’s Ford Bridge in 1946. After a witness came forward fifty years later, the Moore’s Ford lynchings became national news, and the Memorial Committee was founded to bring light to the incident and initiate a healing process for the community. Andrews’ solo exhibition is accompanied by a group show titled The Bridge to Healing, and Andrews’ collage sculpture Rope Man (1968) is displayed.

Andrews has solo exhibitions at The Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC; The Hearne Gallery, Little Rock, AK; The

Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA; Wendell Street Gallery, Cambridge, MA; McIntosh Gallery,

Atlanta, GA; and the Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL.

In March, Harvard University hosts a two-day symposium titled “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: A Series of Conversations on the Use of Black Stereotypes in Contemporary Visual Practice.” Andrews is one of many art world participants, including Metropolitan Museum curator Lowery Stokes Sims, art critic Peter Schjeldhal, and contemporary Black artists Glenn Ligon (b.1960), Carrie Mae Weems (b.1953), and Alison Saar (b.1956). Some conversations at the symposium are heated, with artists, curators, collectors, critics, and academics in disagreement over the appropriateness of recycling Black stereotypes and racist imagery in visual art. Andrews comments that he is “very disappointed in the discussion,” and condemns some participants as favoring young artists, like Kara Walker (b.1969), who employ such overt motifs. He blames racism for allowing such visual stereotypes to persist. Carrie Mae Weems lauds Andrews for his pivotal role in widening the path for Black artists and for “making her work possible.”[22]

In the October issue of Ebony, Andrews is featured as one of twelve “Best-Selling Black Artists.” Other artists listed include John Biggers (1924-2001), Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, and Betye Saar.

1999

In January, A Different Drummer: Benny Andrews, The Music Series, 1991-98, opens at the Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed Gallery in the DAAP Galleries (part of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning) at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Works from and related to the Music Series will be included in Andrews’ other solo exhibitions this year, at the American Jazz Museum, Kansas City, MO; and The Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC. The Critic Series is shown in a solo exhibition at ACA Galleries, New York.

Andrews is a featured artist in the fifth segment of a special six-part documentary series, I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts, on PBS. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the series focuses on the history of African American arts in the 20th century. It is produced by Blackside, Inc., the film production company founded by the late Henry Hampton, who is famous for his civil rights chronicle Eyes on the Prize. Andrews’ inclusion in the program places him firmly among those Black artists whose distinctive talents shaped American culture. The series earns a Peabody Award in the same year.

Benny Andrews and Nene Humphrey receive artist-in-residence fellowships at the Hambidge Center, located in the mountains of northern Georgia.

2000

In the spring, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans mounts The Art of Family, an exhibition of work by Benny Andrews and Nene Humphrey along with select works by other family members. A related exhibition is shown simultaneously at the Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Art Gallery in Lakeville, CT.

In May, Andrews is invited by the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Friends of African and African American Art to give a lecture at the museum. After the lecture, he signs copies of American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan (1997).

Andrews has solo exhibitions at the Southside Gallery, Oxford, MI; the Lower Level Gallery, Suntrust Plaza, Atlanta, GA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Ritz Theater and LaVilla Museum, Jacksonville, FL; and ACA Galleries, New York, NY. His work is presented at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens as part of a Martin Luther King memorial celebration, and Andrews gives a lecture in connection with the show.

2001

Andrews illustrates The Hickory Chair by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (Scholastic Press, 2001). Collages and drawings from the book are shown in solo exhibitions at Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI; and at Atlanta Financial Center, South Tower, Atlanta, GA.

Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at the Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN; Harrison Museum of African American Culture, Roanoke, VA; Art Museum of Western Virginia (now Taubman Museum of Art), Roanoke, VA; Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and the Craftery Gallery, Hartford, CT.

During his solo exhibition at the Craftery Gallery in Hartford, CT, Andrews leads a collage workshop for local fifth grade students. The workshop teaches art appreciation through visual literacy as part of a “We’re Making Connecticut History,” an inter-district school program organized by the Connecticut Historical Society.

 The Special Collections Department of Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library presents Thy Mother is Like a Vine in Thy Blood: Viola P. Andrews and the Andrews Family, an exhibition of archival materials and original artwork drawn from the papers of Benny and Raymond Andrews. The show tells the story of Andrews’ mother, Viola, through objects created by the family.

 April 11 is deemed “Benny Andrews Day” in Waynesboro, Georgia, a small town east of Morgan County. Andrews visits Blakeney Elementary School, where he speaks to students and receives a key to the city from the Mayor.

For the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Andrews creates a special edition poster for the festival events in Congo Square. The colorful poster depicts a boldly dressed woman, holding a small bouquet of flowers, her pose evoking a sense of stoic spirituality. The commissioned poster is published in an artist-signed limited edition of 500, and an unsigned edition of 1,500.

Ogden Museum of Art director Richard J. Gruber designates a permanent gallery in the museum to the Andrews family, to open when the museum opens its new building to the public in 2003. The Andrews-Humphrey Gallery will host revolving exhibitions from the vast collection of family artwork in the museum collection.

2002

Andrews and Humphrey establish the Benny Andrews Foundation; its primary mission is to assist emerging artists in gaining greater recognition. The Foundation also encourages artists to donate their work to historically Black museums. Art in America announces the Foundation’s founding in its December 2002 issue.

On September 14, Benny Andrews: Interiors opens at ACA Galleries, New York. Additional solo exhibitions this year are presented at Brenau University Galleries, Brenau University, Gainesville, GA; the Thomasville Cultural Center, Thomasville, GA; and York College Art Gallery, City University of New York, in Queens, NY.

2003

Andrews illustrates Pictures for Miss Josie by Sandra Belton (HarperCollins), a book celebrating the achievements of educator Josephine Carroll Smith, who played a large part in desegregating the Washington, DC school system. Collages and drawings related to the book illustrations are shown in a solo exhibition at Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI; the show travels to Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, GA; Hearne Fine Art, Little Rock, AR; and Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

Andrews has several additional solo exhibitions this year, at Pei Ling Chan Gallery, Savannah, GA; Winthrop University Galleries, Rock Hill, SC; Blackbridge Hall Gallery, Georgia College, Milledgeville, GA; Curtis L. Ivery Art Gallery, Wayne County Community College, Downtown Campus, Detroit, MI; and Noel Gallery, Charlotte, NC. He has major museum shows at The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; and the Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, VA.

In January, Andrews presents a gallery talk at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, as part of the museum’s “Day of Dreams” event on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

In August, Andrews is a featured speaker at the fifth annual Georgia Literary Festival in Madison, GA, which celebrates Raymond Andrews as one of its featured authors this year. The Festival's theme is “Southern Humor” and Andrews’ lecture is titled “Making Fun out of Life.” There is an exhibition of George Andrews’ work at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center as part of the event, and an illustration by George is featured on the festival brochure.

2004

In the fall, Andrews works at Wingate Studio, a professional intaglio printer and publisher in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. He creates a series of etchings for writer Flannery O’Connor’s short story Everything That Rises Must Converge, which the Limited Editions Club publishes as a portfolio to accompany a fine print edition of O’Connor’s story in 2005. O’Connor was from Georgia, like Andrews, and her writings often include moralizing tales that are set in the American South and heavily reliant on regional settings and grotesque characters. The issue of race frequently appears in O’Connor’s texts, and, also like Andrews, the author’s work was rooted in an interest in individual characters and the unique geographical, social and political conditions of the South. Andrews will complete a painting of O’Connor this year as part of his Migrant Series.

Andrews begins researching his Migrant Series, which will address three moments when people in the United States were displaced en masse. Between 2004 and 2006, he takes three separate trips: along Route 66 and other roads taken by Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression, along the path of Cherokee people force-marched from their Mississippi homeland to Oklahoma in 1838 on what became known as the Trail of Tears, and to New Orleans and the Gulf coast to study areas devastated by flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Traveling with Andrews on each journey is photographer and filmmaker Stanley Staniski, who is in the process of making a film about Andrews.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., commissions Andrews to produce an edition of lithographs, titled  Education Quest, for their celebration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka. 

Andrews has solo exhibitions at the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, Eatonville, FL; Savannah College of Art and Design’s Savannah Gallery, Atlanta, GA; the Huntington House Museum, Windsor, CT; and the Lyda Moore Merrick Gallery, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham, NC. A documentary about Andrews is screened as part of the Hayti Heritage Center’s annual Black Diaspora Film Festival in connection with the exhibition.

Benny Andrews: The Migrant Series opens at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, in April. The show travels to ACA Galleries, New York, over the summer, and will visit the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (now Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art), Virginia Beach, VA, in 2006.

In addition to several other group exhibitions, Andrews is included in Hair Stories, a large show at the Chicago Cultural Center in downtown Chicago, IL. The exhibition comprises over 60 artworks by artists spanning three generations, all of which explore the  history and significance - social and political - of hair in African American communities. Other artists include Jacob Lawrence, James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks (1912-2006), along with contemporary artists Dawoud Bey (b.1953), Kerry James Marshall (b.1955), and David Hammons.

Artwork by Andrews is featured in The Sisyphus Syndrome, a multidimensional thematic opera concert based on the mythological creature, Sisyphus, who rolled the stone up the hill only to have it roll back on him. The play is a collaborative project between Andrews, opera singer Kevin Maynor, dancer Adrienne Armstrong, writer Amiri Baraka, and a range of composers and other cultural producers. It premieres in September in the Langston Hughes Auditorium at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

2005    

Andrews creates Trail of Tears (The Migrant Series). The work is displayed at the Ogden Museum of Art in the fall, immediately following the museum’s October reopening after being forced to close for Hurricane Katrina. Chief Curator David Houston estimates that up to 1,200 people visited the museum to view the work, quite a feat for a city whose population dwindled from half a million to around 100,00 from Katrina’s aftermath.

Candlewick Press (a division of Random House) publishes Delivering Justice, a biography of civil rights leader Westley Wallace (W.W.) Law written for young readers by Jim Haskins and illustrated by Benny Andrews. The book tells the story of Law’s role in the Savannah Boycott. 

Andrews is the juror for the Tri-State Juried Exhibition of the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, “Artistic Fragments: Art 2005,” which occurs every three years and opens in June. He selects from over 1,000 entries.

2006    

On May 24, a reception is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, in honor of Benny Andrews, celebrating his six etchings and “Afterword” for Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge published by Limited Editions (2005).

John Lewis in the Lead: A Story of the Civil Rights Movement by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson with illustrations by Andrews is published by Lee & Low Books, Inc. Lewis, a celebrated civil rights leader, respected United States Congressman, and friend of the artist, shared Andrews’ inherent belief in justice and activism. Paintings related to the book illustrations are exhibited in a solo exhibition at Parish Gallery, Washington, DC; the show travels to Mason Murer Fine Art, Atlanta, GA. This series of works is the last created by Andrews before his death.

Andrews has additional solo exhibitions at Mary Pauline Gallery, Augusta, GA; and at Sherry Washington Gallery, Detroit, MI, where he exhibits works from the W.W. Law book illustrations. Trail of Tears (The Migrant Series) is shown at ACA Galleries, New York.

Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes is published by Sterling Publishers and features illustrations by Andrews.

Harlem Really Cooks: The Nouvelle Soul Food of Harlem, a cookbook by Sandra Lawrence, is published by Lake Isle Press. The colorful book of multicultural cuisine is illustrated with works by Andrews that depict scenes related to the author’s Harlem roots.

On November 10, Benny Andrews dies of cancer in his New York home. He is 75. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children from an earlier marriage - Julia, Christopher and Thomas - and four grandchildren.

2007    

On January 13, a memorial service for Benny Andrews is held at The Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York. Poetry readings and musical performances are interspersed with a program of  speakers that includes J. Richard Gruber (then director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art), the Honorable John Lewis, Andrews’ hospice caregiver Patsy Creighton, poet Ronald King, curator Lowery Stokes Sims, Andrews’ close friend Laura Hansen, and Christopher Andrews. Dr. Sims’ remarks are reproduced in the spring 2007 issue of Studio, The Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, in a feature article, “Benny Andrews: A Reminiscence.”

In January, the Ogden Museum pays tribute to Andrews with the presentation of Benny Andrews: Memorial Exhibition.

In February, two solo shows celebrate his work: Benny Andrews: Works from the Miles College Collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and Benny Andrews: Works on Paper at the Trois Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. Benny Andrews: The John Lewis Series opens at the Tubman Museum, Macon, GA, in December. The series will be exhibited at other venues throughout the South in the coming years, including the Sumter County Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC (2008); North Carolina Central University Art Museum, Durham, NC (2009); and the Myrtle Beach Art Museum, Myrtle Beach, SC (2009).

Benny Andrews: A Georgia Artist Comes Home is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta over the summer before traveling to the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA. The exhibition is guest curated by Louisa McIntosh, who owned and directed the McIntosh Gallery in Atlanta until its closing in 1997. McIntosh presented Andrews’ work many times throughout the gallery’s tenure, and in speaking about this exhibition, she praises Andrews: “I count it as one of life’s blessings that I knew and worked with Benny Andrews over a period of many years. Through his penetrating perception of the world around him he could express equally well, with words or with paint, joy, sorrow, pain and exultation. There have been other prominent African American artists before him, but I believe that Andrews’ insight into the human condition as revealed in his work has done more than that of any other artist to bridge the gap between races. Few artists have demonstrated the ability to capture an experience that unites all segments of society.  Today the work of Benny Andrews is welcomed and admired in rural Morgan County, where he grew up under impoverished circumstances, as well as among the most sophisticated circles of Atlanta.”[23]

Artwork and materials from Andrews’ personal and family archives are exhibited in Benny Andrews: Voice of the Artist at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL). In addition to original works on loan from other collections, the unique exhibition showcases sketchbooks that Andrews produced while serving in the Air Force and while studying at SAIC. The library also displays material from the archival collections of Viola, George and Raymond, to demonstrate the foundation of Andrews’ artistic inclinations and the family’s artistic interrelationships. In 1999, MARBL, part of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory, received from the artist approximately 160 boxes of archival material that included manuscripts, sketch books, and journals. Andrews and Humphrey donate additional material over the years from 2001 to 2017, making the Benny Andrews Papers at MARBL the most extensive public resource for Andrews’ life and archives. In 2015, following an extensive renovation, the library will reopen as the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

The John Lewis Series of drawings is purchased for the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. Selections from the series will be exhibited at the Center in 2014, when the building opens to the public.

Andrews wins an Illustrator Honor Award, one of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards, for his illustrations in Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes (2006).

2008

Andrews is included in African American Art: 200 Years, which opens in January at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by curator Lowery Stokes Sims and art historian Jonathan Binstock.

The Benny Andrews Foundation donates over 300 of Andrews’ artworks to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), which was founded in 1945 with a mission to make college education available to minority students. Led by Humphrey,  the Benny Andrews Foundation partners with UNCF in the distribution and use of this outstanding collection. Under the terms of the gift, UNCF will distribute these works to appropriate cultural and educational institutions, with the purpose of using the artworks as the foundation for arts education initiatives such as lectures, workshops, and similar programming. UNCF donates works by Andrews to more than thirty institutions nationwide over the next ten years.

Stanley J. Staniski: On the Road with Benny Andrews, an exhibition of photographs from Staniski’s travels with Andrews during his Migrant Series research, opens at the Ogden Museum. The exhibition comprises over thirty images, some of which are selected from a larger body of Staniski’s work that is inspired by his journeys with Andrews. Writing about the series, Staniski explains: “Other photographic trips grew out of those with Benny, and while I made photographs along roads (Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia) other than the specific migrant routes of Benny’s interest, for me they are all of the same series, perhaps they are part of his legacy.”[24]

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery becomes the representative of the Benny Andrews Estate.

2010

In March, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents a spotlight exhibition of Andrews’ work at the Armory Show, held on Pier 92 in New York.

Work by Andrews is installed in the residence of United States Ambassador David I. Adelman in Singapore, as part of  the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program. In 2014, the program will place works by Andrews in the U.S. Embassy in Rabat, Morocco; and in the U.S. Embassy in Maseru, Lethoso, in 2015.

The UNCF honors Benny Andrews’ legacy with the President’s Award to the Benny Andrews Foundation. Nene Humphrey accepts this award.

The Benny Andrews Foundation is dissolved and the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation is established. The mission of this educational non-profit organization is to maintain, build and facilitate knowledge and understanding around the life and work of Benny Andrews. The Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation oversees Andrews’ personal archive of writing and photographs and an extensive collection of his artwork, and is located in Andrews’ former studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. The foundation refers to its location, archive and programming as the Benny Andrews Estate.

2011

Andrews is included in Collage, a group exhibition that opens in May at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

2012

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews in a three-person exhibition along with Alice Neel and Bob Thompson. The show is favorably reviewed in the May 2012 issue of ARTnews. Later this year, Andrews is included in the gallery’s group exhibition titled ...On Paper.

In December, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery opens INsite/INChelsea: The Inaugural Exhibition, in its new location in Chelsea, New York. Andrews’ Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree (1969) features prominently in the expansive show.

The Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University presents an exhibition of drawings, Like a Purple Haze Across the Land: The Art of Benny Andrews. In conjunction, they offer a symposium on Andrews’ life and work; Nene Humphrey delivers the address “Artist to Artist: Reflections on a Life Together.”

2013

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents in its new Chelsea gallery Benny Andrews: There Must Be A Heaven, the first comprehensive retrospective since the artist’s death. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue with an essay by Dr. curator Lowery Stokes Sims and a foreword by Congressman John Lewis.

2014

Andrews is included in two group exhibitions at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Rising Up/Uprising: Twentieth Century African American Art, which opens in March; and Solitary Soul, in the fall.

Shortly following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, art historian and consulting curator Darby English works with MoMA curatorial staff to install Andrews’ No More Games (1970) in a prominent gallery in response to the racist act of police brutality. The large-scale collaged painting, which depicts a young Black man and a White woman, who is shrouded by an American flag, is described by English as “an expressively abundant statement about race relations.”[25] This is the same work that first appeared at MoMA in the Artist as Adversary exhibition in 1971.

2015

Andrews is included in the exhibition It’s Never Just Black or White at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which features work in a range of media by over 60 artists.

In collaboration with the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation, Author Kathleen Benson publishes Draw What You See: The Life and Art of Benny Andrews (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a children’s book that tells Andrews’ story as an artist, activist, and teacher. Paintings by Andrews comprise the book’s illustrations. Benson’s juvenile biography focuses on the efforts Andrews made, through his life and art, to gain visibility for those often excluded by the art world. A review of the book in The New York Times applauds the incorporation of Andrews’ own paintings into Benson’s writing: “Every image has a magnetic intelligence that is hard to look away from,” and the author’s language “is workmanlike, letting the inspirational facts of Andrews’ life speak for themselves.”[26] 

2016

In February, works by Andrews are displayed in the D.R. Glass Library at Texas College in Tyler, TX. The exhibition celebrates Black History Month and highlights the works recently donated to the College by the UNCF.

Timed to coincide with the U.S. Presidential election, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series. The exhibition is the first time that paintings and drawings from all six subseries (Symbols, Trash, Circle, Sexism, War and Utopia) have been shown together, as most works had not previously been exhibited publicly. A fully illustrated color catalogue, with an essay by Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African American Collections in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, accompanies the exhibition. The show is praised - and the series commended for its contemporary relevance - in Art in America, The New York Times, ARTnews, and other publications.

Art historian Susan E. Cahan publishes Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Duke University Press), which chronicles African American artists’ struggle for inclusion in the museum system and the historical canon during the 1960s and 1970s. The book features a detailed account of Andrews’ work as co-founder of the BECC, and Cahan cites Andrews’ personal journals and interviews in outlining the group’s protests of exclusionary museum exhibitions and their negotiations for a greater voice for Black artists in New York’s art world.  The book’s introduction begins with a quote from Andrews: “Up until the sixties, the gallery system would have X number of artists, established artists - like, ten. Those artists very often decided who the one or two young artists would be to come in, like proteges, and then they would be nourished and they would become the next group. And for the average person - average artist - there was no way to enter unless they got, literally, what the slaves got: a note from the master to come in. You’d go to a gallery and if you didn’t know some famous artists, they’d wonder: Why are you there? … The art criticism was just as impossible to deal with. You just say there like you sat waiting for the morning paper to come … and those criticisms were either devastating or they made you; the gallery dealers and the curators just looked to what the critics were saying.”[27]

The Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation launches the website bennyandrews.com, an online educational resource on Andrews’ life and work.

2017

The Library at The MacDowell Colony (now MacDowell) mounts a small solo exhibition of Andrews’ work.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Collage: Made in America, which features Andrews’ Circle (The Bicentennial Series) (1973). In a review of the show in Hyperallergic, artist and journalist Melissa Stern notes the significance of the monumental work, which she calls “a huge, searing indictment of racism in America.” The multi-canas work is  “an overtly angry and political work of art, one that has continuing resonance today.”[28] Later in the year, Andrews is included in an exhibition of figurative work at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Figuratively Speaking.

Andrews’ Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree (1969) is a featured work in the blockbuster traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, organized by the Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, and The Broad, Los Angeles, CA. The exhibition travels throughout the United States through 2020, visiting the following venues: Tate Modern, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree is installed in a gallery subtitled “New York: Revolutionary Images and Art World Activism.” The Tate Modern includes the work in an activity for children to accompany the exhibition, entitled “Kids Think About Art and Race,” which asks young visitors to view select artworks and consider the materials and meaning, specifically prompting discussions about themes of freedom, peace, and love as they appear in works by Black artists like Andrews. Andrews’ painting becomes a symbol for the major exhibition, appearing in online announcements and articles worldwide. Over the exhibition’s years-long and multi-venue tenure, several reviews highlight the painting, including those published in The Telegraph, Apollo Magazine, CNN Style, Culture Type, The Washington Post, and Hyperallergic.

Hunter College of the City University of New York mounts Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971 at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery on Hunter’s main campus. The group exhibition revisits the 1971 exhibition, Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition: Black Artists in Rebuttal, which was organized by members of the BECC in response to the Whitney Museum’s refusal to hire a Black curator for its Contemporary Black Artists show that year. At Hunter, Andrews is one of ten of the 47 artists from the original Rebuttal show included in the remounted exhibition. The show also includes a collection of posters, newspapers, mailers, and letters documenting Acts of Art, the Rebuttal show, and responses to it. Hunter’s exhibition description features a statement made by Andrews about the 1971 show at Acts of Art: “The Rebuttal show offers a chance to give art historians a handle to grasp in putting whatsoever it is that happened this time in history concerning a group of artists identified by their Black skins." This contemporary version of the exhibition takes up that handle and Andrews’ invitation to “grasp...this time in history.”[29]

2018

Andrews has solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; and the Hammond, IN, and Westville, IN, campuses of Purdue University Northwest.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Truth & Beauty: Charles White and His Circle, which reflects on the White’s long career and traces the trajectory of his most influential relationships forged in and around Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Andrews studied at SAIC 16 years after White attended the school, and is one of an array of artists with connections to White included in this show. Andrews’ essay “Charles White was a Drawer” is printed in the exhibition catalogue, along with other artist texts that had been published in a special 1980 issue of Freedomways honoring White’s life. The essay describes Andrews’ respect for White, the importance of drawing for young African American artists, and White’s commitment to putting the needs of his community above his own.

The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, prominently showcases Andrews’ Sexism (1973) in its AT&T Lobby as part of the exhibition Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art. The sprawling mixed-media painting, part of the Bicentennial Series, is a powerful work to display in such a high-trafficked area of the museum. Inspired by Andrews’ involvement with feminist groups and activists, Sexism explores oppressions of women and is humorous, surreal, provocative and complex in its contemplation of the distribution of power among genders.

Andrews’ Study for Portrait of Oppression (Homage to Black South Africans) (1985) is included in Histórias Afro-Atlânticas at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil. The exhibition is large and expansive, presenting 450 works by over 200 artists in efforts to draw parallels and highlight frictions between the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories. With works ranging from the 16th to the 21st century, these stories are told from different but overlapping perspectives. Critic Holland Cotter praises the show in The New York Times and mentions Andrews’ work as an example of the exhibition’s presentation of dynamic, narrative images. The show will travel to the United States for exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX in 2021; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 2022.

The Studio Museum in Harlem launches a new initiative, “Find Art Here,” which places reproductions of works from its collection in public schools, libraries, and service centers across Harlem. A reproduction of Andrews’ Composition (Study for Trash) (1971), is installed at P.S. 79 Horan School, located on E. 120th Street near Marcus Garvey Park.

 2019

Benny Andrews: Illustrator opens at the Madison Public Safety Building, Madison, GA, before traveling to  the Morgan County African-American Museum (MCAAM). The exhibition is organized by the MCAAM and curated by Pellom McDaniels III, and highlights Andrews’ legacy as an illustrator of children’s books. At the exhibition opening reception, McDaniels, Nene Humphrey, and others read from books illustrated by Andrews.

Among Others: Blackness at MoMA is published by MoMA, featuring nearly 200 works in MoMA’s collection by 132 Black artists. It is an expansive book that examines the museum’s relationship to Black artists, Black audiences, and art about Blackness throughout its history. Co-editor Darby English authors an essay on Andrews’ 1970 painting No More Games in one of the short texts specially commissioned for the volume.

In October, following four months of total closure for renovations, MoMA reopens with major expansions to gallery spaces and new installations of the permanent collection. Andrews’ work No More Games (1970) is featured in the spotlight installation “War Within, War Without,” part of the new permanent collection exhibition Collection 1940s-1970s.

Andrews is included in the traveling exhibition For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design, a landmark show organized by the National Academy of Design in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts. The exhibition highlights a pivotal aspect of the Academy’s collection - artworks donated by elected National Academicians (Andrews became a National Academician in 1997). The show will travel to multiple venues over the next two years: Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, FL; The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; and the; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.

In the illustrated For America exhibition catalogue, Andrews features prominently with an essay by art historian Patricia Hills describing his political activism along with his relationship with artist May Stevens, and a special essay by artist Fred Wilson (b. 1954) about Andrews’ work Collagist, Self-Portrait (1994). In the essay, Wilson reflects on Andrews’ profound influence: “Benny was a thoughtful, and congenial presence in the art world. However, he was always ready to challenge the biased policies and presumptions of the self-satisfied, self-congratulatory, and flat out racially ignorant art world of this time. Benny Andrews was someone I could look up to. ...Now that I am as grey as Benny was when I knew him, I admire this work even more. Making and remaking oneself and revealing the world all that you see as unspoken or unjust is the greatest contribution an artist can make.”[30]

Andrews’ large, multi-canvas work Trail of Tears (2005), part of The Migrant Series, is a featured work in the exhibition The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. The monumental work, which illustrates the long history of marginalization and displacement of minorities that continues to this day, is reproduced in numerous writings and reviews about the exhibition. Online publications highlighting Trail of Tears include Experiment Station, the Phillips Collection’s blog, The Wall Street Journal, and Art & Object.

A reproduction of Andrews’ Portrait of a Collagist (1989) is installed at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, to be on display for two years as part of a new Art in the Airport program organized by the Wayne County Airport Authority and the Wayne Council for the Arts, History, and Humanities. The program highlights the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Inside|Out program, which showcases reproductions from the museum’s collection in outdoor venues throughout Detroit. In previous years, reproductions of Portrait of a Collagist have appeared in various locations around the city, and one will be installed at the Madison Heights Public Library in 2020.

2020

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery includes work by Andrews in the group exhibition Paper Power, which presents a variety of works exploring the materiality of paper.

Andrews work Sexism #8 (1963) is included in the exhibition Catalyst: Art and Social Change, curated by Jessica Bell Brown, at the Gracie Mansion in New York, the official residence of the Mayor of New York City. Catalyst is the final art exhibition of the de Blasio Administration and the largest show to-date at Gracie Mansion, bringing together over 75 works by more than 50 artists and activists from the 1960s through 2020. The show is extraordinarily diverse and provocative, showcasing art that addresses social justice and takes on some of the biggest challenges of contemporary times: racial inequality; climate change; ableism, homophobia; immigration reform, misogyny and more. The exhibition is organized into seven themes: Affirming Self; Concepts of Justice; E Pluribus Unum/Out of Many, One; The Habitable Earth; Health, Wellness, and Universal Access; A Livable City; and Pursuit of Equality. Andrews’ Sexism #8 is included in the “Pursuit of Equality” theme.

Andrews’ Baptism Study (1994) is the subject of an episode of the podcast Accession titled “Take Me to the Water.” The episode uses the painting as a focal point, drawing inspiration from a number of people talking about their experience with baptism. “Take Me to the Water” is an “audio fiction” based on Baptism Study, an aural illustration of the work in which a congregation gathers on the bank of a river to be baptised.

Artist Deborah Roberts (b.1962) selects and discusses Andrews’ No More Games (1970), and its newly installed location at MoMA, for a June edition of “The Week in Art” – a podcast series produced by The Art Newspaper.

In July, The MacDowell Colony, the 113-year-old artist residency program where Andrews received four fellowships in the 1970s and later served on the Board of Directors, unanimously votes to remove “Colony” from its name because of the “oppressive overtones” of the terminology. The change comes in response to a staff petition and feedback from the larger artistic community, and occurs as predominantly White arts institutions across the United States are addressing their own histories of racism and inequity amid national protests against racial injustice and police brutality. Also in July, MacDowell  posts a special article on its website about Benny Andrews’ legacy as an artist and activist. Featuring a brief essay, a video interview with the artist, and reproductions of a selection of paintings and collages, the article proclaims, “Independence Weekend a Perfect Time to Reflect on Benny Andrews’ Art.”

Andrews’ Symbols (1971) is reproduced on a billboard overlooking Interstate 135 in Wichita, Kansas. This installation is part of the Ulrich Museum of Art’s public exhibition project, Ulrich + Artists + You: Community Billboard Project. From July - December 2020, the Ulrich presents works from its collection - evoking themes of heroism and leadership, identity and family, politics and religion, and the precious routines of everyday life - on 20 billboards throughout Wichita. With precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many museums such as the Ulrich to remain closed to the public through 2020, the museum mounts this project as a creative response to the current situation by making art from its collection accessible and visible to a broad public.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THIS CHRONOLOGY

This chronology represents the collaborative research of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and the Benny Andrews Estate. It is published in the 2020 Michael Rosenfeld Gallery exhibition catalog Benny Andrews: Portraits, A Real Person Before the Eyes. The Benny Andrews Estate is deeply grateful to the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and to researchers Valentina Spalten and Sophie Jenkins for their dedicated work on this essential contribution to Benny Andrews scholarship.

CONTRIBUTORS

Benny Andrews: A Real Person Before the Eyes Catalogue Design and Editors:
halley k harrisburg, Director, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Matthew Newton, Associate Director, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Researchers:
Valentina Spalten, Senior Associate, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Sophie Jenkins, Research Associate, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Kyle Williams, Director, Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation

Dating in this document for works of art and events in the artist’s life reflect the most current research. Biographical information is drawn from archival holdings in the Benny Andrews Estate as well as the following major monograph: Gruber, Richard, J. American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997. Georgia: Morris Museum of Art, 1997.

For further scholarship, we encourage researchers to consult the Benny Andrews papers (1940-2006), held at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. The papers include correspondence, exhibition files, files relating to Andrews’ work with the National Endowment for the Arts, photographs, printed material, writings and illustrations, audio-visual and born digital material, artwork, and Andrews family correspondence and papers.

https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/andrewsbenny845/

LEGEND: Organizations and Institutions

BECC                Black Emergency Cultural Coalition

ICRY                 Inner City Roundtable of Youths

MARBL             (Stuart A. Rose) Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University

MoMA              Museum of Modern Art

NAACP             National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NEA                  National Endowment for the Arts

SAIC                 School of the Art Institute of Chicago

UNCF                United Negro College Fund

[1] Benny Andrews, “Sources,” in Between the Lines: 70 Drawings and 7 Essays (New York: Pella Pub. Co., 1978), 9.

[2] Benny Andrews, “My Working With Collage and Its Meaning As I See It,” unpublished manuscript, 1984, 1,7; Benny Andrews, “Autobiography III,” unpublished manuscript, 1972, 309.

[3] Andrews, quoted in  J. Richard Gruber, American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997 exh. cat. (Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1997), 86.

[4] For certain artists mentioned throughout this chronology, we have been unable to confirm birth and death dates. Our research is ongoing and we will continue to update these details as they are confirmed.

[5] This interview is part of the Archives of American Art’s Oral History Program, which began in 1958 with seed money from the Ford Foundation. The Archives set out to record the life stories of the artists, collectors, dealers, and others who have shaped the visual arts in the United States. The Archives of American Art will become part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1970.

[6] Press Release, In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 30, 1968, https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_333087.pdf?_ga=2.134302193.1601231713.1594845794-526719069.1567114546.

[7] For extensive scholarship on these controversies, see Caroline V. Wallace, “Exhibiting Authenticity: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition's Protests of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968-71,” Art Journal vol. 74, no. 2 (Summer 2015), 5-7.

[8] Andrews, interview, July 14, 1999, as quoted in Susan E. Cahan, “Performing Identity and Persuading a Public: The Harlem On My Mind Controversy,” Social Identities vol. 13, no. 4 (July 2007), 432.

[9] Press Release, The Artist as Adversary, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 1, 1971, https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_333113.pdf?_ga=2.220857050.396197187.1591972672-526719069.1567114546.

[10] Benny Andrews, in Benny Andrews and Rudolf Baranik, eds., Attica Book, by the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam (South Hackensack, NJ: Custom Communications Systems, Inc., 1972), n.p.

[11] Benny Andrews, et al., in “Letters,” Artforum vol. 11, no. 10 (Summer 1973), 8.

[12] Alexandra C. Anderson, “Art from the Inside,” Art in America 61 (March-April 1973), 14-15.

[13] MacDowell was conceived in 1906 by Marian MacDowell, a pianist, in honor of her husband, composer Edward MacDowell. It had been Edward’s wish, as he became prematurely and gravely ill soon after buying the land in 1896, to make a community of the couple’s New Hampshire property where artists could work in an ideal place in the stimulating company of peers. With funding from prominent citizens including Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpont Morgan, MacDowell welcomed its first artist fellows in 1908, shortly before Edward died. Marian would spend the next five decades garnering support for the program, and the residency would soon be home to 32 individual artist studios.

[14] Benny Andrews, interview by Ruth Bowman, Views on Art, WNYC, April 30, 1973 (THE NYPR Archives Collection, WNYC Archives ID 8592), https://www.wnyc.org/story/benny-andrews/.

[15] The Benny Andrews papers (1940-2006) at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, contain digitized recordings of three different interviews between Andrews and Van Der Zee, dated 1975, 1976, and 1977.

[16] The first MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum opened in January 1975. Other artists with MATRIX exhibitions in the 1970s include Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Romare Bearden, Jasper Johns (b.1930), Betye Saar (b.1926), Chuck Close (b.1940), and Andy Warhol (1928-1987).

[17] Benny Andrews, “American Art of the Past Twenty Years: A Wonderful Potpourri of Styles and Sources,” Art Journal vol. 39, no. 4 (Summer 1980), 292.

[18] Mary Schmidt Campbell, quoted in Marcia Froelke Coburn, “Art Exhibition Captures a Turbulent Decade,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1987, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-06-22-8702160518-story.html.

[19] Michael Brenson, “Art: Studio Museum in Black Art of the 60s,” The New York Times, May 31, 1985.

[20] Benny Andrews, "Artist's Statement: Doing the 'America Series'," in Benny Andrews: The America Series exh. cat. (Santa Clara: Triton Museum of Art, 1992), page.

[21] Andrews, as quoted in Owen McNally, “Benny Andrews’ Art Shows World That Looks Beyond Color,” The Hartford Courant, October 30, 1994.

[22] Catherine Fox, “Sparks Fly at Debate on Black Stereotypes,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 20, 1998, H5.

[23] Louisa McIntosh, “Benny Andrews: A Georgia Artist Comes Home,” Exhibitions and Events, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, July 2007, https://mocaga.org/calendar/benny-andrews/.

[24] Stanley Staniski, quoted in “On the Road with Benny Andrews,” Verso: An Insider’s Look at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (blog), October 12, 2009, http://omsablog.blogspot.com/2009/10/on-road-with-benny-andrews.html.

[25] Darby English, To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 9.

[26] Maria Russo, “Reaching for Beauty,” The New York Times, January 7, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/books/review/draw-what-you-see-and-leontyne-price.html?_r=0.

[27] Benny Andrews, quoted in Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

[28] Melissa Stern, “An Eclectic Assortment of Collages, Cut from Context and Pasted Together,” Hyperallergic, March 22, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/366995/an-eclectic-assortment-of-collages-cut-from-context-and-pasted-together/.

[29] Press Release, Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, October 2018, http://huntercollegeartgalleries.org/events/2018/rebuttal.

[30] Fred Wilson, “Fred Wilson on Benny Andrews,” in For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design, ed. Jeremiah William McCarthy and Diana Thompson, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, distributed for the American Federation of Arts, 2019), 256.