Mixed Media, Watercolor

Painting of an African American woman with short hair standing next to an abstract tree by southern artist Benny Andrews in 1975. Signed and dated in lower right corner. Hung in a decorative frame with a simple white mat.

Born in 1930, one of ten children in a Georgia farming family, Benny Andrews grew up desperately poor. 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. Two kinds of influence coexist in Andrews's art. The first is an exuberant regionalism that takes into account the lives of the poor; Andrews sees a precedent in the work of Thomas Hart Benton. The second is the narrative impulse of much African-American painting, including that of outstanding modernists such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, who invested their renderings of black life with dignity and pathos. Bennie Andrews died of cancer on November 10, 2006.

H 35 in. x W 27 in.

H 29 in. x W 21 in.