1930-2006
Works in the Collection
Biography
Benny Andrews was born in 1930 in Plainview, Georgia, one of 10 children in a farming family. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. He differed from his fellow students, mostly Abstract Expressionists, by going off to jazz clubs to draw. In 1958, he moved to New York, where his artist friends included Red Grooms, Bob Thompson and the Soyer brothers. For two years (1982-84), he served as director of the Visual Art Program for the National Endowment for the Arts, after which he returned to full-time painting.
His work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana. The artist died in Brooklyn, New York in 2006.