BENNY ANDREWS MEMORIAL

A Memorial will be held for National Conference of Artists New York, Board member and master artist Benny Andrews, who joined the ancestors, just 3 days before his 76th birthday, on November 10th, 2006. The memorial will be held on Saturday, January 13, 2007 at The Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York, (Astor Place and 8th Street) at 11 a.m. His wife, Nene Humphrey, made the announcement.
 

Benny, joined the NCAny board early this summer, but had to resign three months later, when he discovered that he had been diagnosed with Duck bile cancer. His father George was a self-taught artist. Bennie has been described as southern folk artists, a figural expressionistic painter whose caricature like paintings, prints, drawings and collages depicted images of his roots in segregated Georgia and the farming community of Plainview where he was born. His illustrations told a story, a story derived from his childhood memories and the life of suffering that Black people experienced below the Mason-Dixon line, where man’s inhumanity to man and the level of human injustice was most prevalent in the U.S. Those experiences helped shape his concern for human justice, whether it was the quest for civil rights by African Americans in the U.S., the anti-war cry by concerned citizens in the U.S., or the genocidal actions and forced relocation of American Indians, the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.
 

Despite having to labor in the cotton fields along with his nine other siblings, he at age 18, became the first of his family to graduate from high school.

He went later joined the air force and upon discharge, used the G.I. bill to enroll in the famed Art Institute of Chicago and studied abstract expressionism and illustration and earned his Masters of Fine Art.

In 1958, Bennie moved to New York. He had his first solo exhibition, at the Forum Gallery, in 1962. Many exhibitions were to follow.

Andrews taught art at Queens College from 1968 to 1997. For nearly thirty years, he was actively engaged in creating his art, exhibiting, teaching and arts administration, and the establishment of a visual arts initiative in the New York state prisons, one that became nationally adopted.

Bennie won a coveted John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1965, a program that was established by one of America’s most distinguished diplomats, publishers and philanthropists and founder of the oldest venture capital firms in the U.S.

Andrews received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and later served as the director of the visual arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982-4 and was beneficial to assisting many organizations that were previously under funded.

Benny's brother Raymond Andrews (1934-91), was a widely acclaimed novelist who wrote on the experiences of Black people in the South, Georgia in particular, and won the James Baldwin Prize for fiction with his very first novel, Appalachee Red in 1979. Bennie illustrated all of Raymond’s books.

Bennie’s huge body of work graces many major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Art Institute of Chicago. A large body of his work resides in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and he donated his archives of material about black artists in the 1960s and ’70s to Harlem’s Studio Museum. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.

Even up until the end, he was serving the underserved, working in the Gulf, on an art project with children displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

In addition to his wife Nene, he is survived by three children from an earlier marriage, Julia, Christopher and Thomas; and four grandchildren. .