Benny Andrews "There Must Be a Heaven"

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

poster for Benny Andrews "There Must Be a Heaven"

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Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Benny Andrews: There Must Be A Heaven, an exhibition of thirty-six works that span from 1964 to 2005. It is the first comprehensive survey since Andrews’s death in 2006 and the first solo exhibition of his work at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which recently moved to 100 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

A self-described “people’s painter,” Benny Andrews (American, 1930-2006) was born in Plainview, Georgia, to a family of sharecroppers. In 1948, he received a small scholarship to attend college, but eventually had to drop out. He joined the US Air Force in 1950, served for the duration of the Korean War, and received an honorable discharge in 1954. With funding from the GI Bill, Andrews returned to school, enrolling in the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1958, he received his degree and left Chicago for New York City.

Settling in a tenement on the Lower East Side, he developed the “rough collage” technique that became a hallmark of his style. As Sims in her catalogues essay explains,

“Andrews’s use of collage came out of that fact that he found oil painting ‘too academic’ and imbued with more ‘sophisticated’ associations. He found the textural quality of college appealing, and he used it to ‘keep himself off balance.’ . . . Andrews’s work, with its calculated awkwardness, unconventional techniques, and Southern focus, exists provocatively alongside that of self-taught artists. But as art historian and Andrews scholar J. Richard Gruber would caution us, despite Andrews’s predilection for ‘realistic subject matter, he was intrigued by the fundamental issues associated with abstract art.’ While he was often in conflict with his instructors and peers over the emphasis on abstract expressionism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . . . he would come to be ‘increasingly more convinced that all art was fundamentally abstract.”

By the 1960s, Andrews had mastered this technique and was invited to join Forum Gallery. In 1965, with funding from a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Andrews traveled to Georgia and began working on his Autobiographical Series. He continued to paint, exhibit, travel, write, and teach until his death from cancer at age 76. During his lifetime, he lectured extensively and received numerous fellowships, grants, and other awards from prestigious international institutions. His work is featured in over thirty permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, High Museum (Atlanta, Georgia), Art Institute of Chicago, Studio Museum of Harlem, and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC).

Andrews did not see art as a substitute for action. In 1968, he began teaching at Queens College, CUNY, where he was part of the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program designed to help students from underserved areas prepare for college. In 1969, he was a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which advocated for greater representation of black artists, curators, and intellectuals within major museums. In 1971, the art classes he had been teaching at the Manhattan Detention Complex became the cornerstone of a nation-wide prison art program. From 1982 to 1984, he directed the NEA’s Visual Arts Program, and shortly before his death in 2006, Andrews was working on an art project in the Gulf Coast with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, he and his wife, sculptor Nene Humphrey, established the Benny Andrews Foundation to help emerging artists gain greater recognition and to encourage artists to donate their work to historically black museums. In 2008, The Foundation donated over 300 of Andrews’s artworks to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to be distributed to appropriate cultural and educational institutions that will use the artworks as a foundation for education initiatives.

[Image: Benny Andrews "War (Study #1)" (1974) oil and graphite on canvas with painted fabric collage and rope , 34 x 25 x 1 ¼ in.]

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Schedule

from March 19, 2013 to May 18, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-03-16 from 18:00 to 20:00

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