MILWAUKEE — Benny Andrews was a painter, in addition to an activist, an artwork educator in prisons, and an inspiration to many Black artists. He made figurative work using a way he referred to as “rough collage,” the place he selectively constructed up elements of the composition with paper or material.
Previous to his dying in 2006, on the age of 75, he organized a basis to protect his studio in Brooklyn and oversee his property. Hassle at Ruth Arts, the exhibition area run by the Ruth Basis for the Arts, was organized in collaboration with the Benny Andrews Property. The exhibition is superbly located on this newly renovated area of brick partitions and pure gentle. A lot of the works are portraits. Work that extra straight touch upon race and politics, equivalent to “No More Games” (1970) within the Museum of Trendy Artwork’s assortment, are absent right here. But each side of Andrews’s life concerned preventing and caring for his personal group, and the portraits mirror this.
Andrews was eager about artwork as a baby, rising up in a sharecropper household in Georgia with 9 siblings. After serving within the Korean Struggle, he enrolled on the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago (SAIC), receiving his BFA in 1958. It was at SAIC that he started incorporating discovered supplies into his work; the earliest work on this present, “Janitors at Rest” (1957–58), presciently established his model for the rest of his profession.
Benny Andrews, “For Colored Girls” (1977), oil on canvas with painted material collage
Andrews was one in every of 9 Black college students at SAIC within the Nineteen Fifties. He was additionally one of many few dedicated to figurative work whereas Summary Expressionism reigned. He wrote in an unpublished essay, included within the present’s handouts, that he was not widespread and didn’t get invited to social occasions. As an alternative, he discovered kinship with the varsity’s custodial employees, who have been Black and in addition from the South. Andrews would go to them, the place they frolicked within the males’s room, to talk and share a sip of whiskey. The custodians’ calloused arms and worn overalls, he mentioned, felt acquainted. The day he had his artistic breakthrough, he had gone down the corridor from his portray class to talk with them. “I went back to my class and started painting my idea of them,” he wrote. When the portray nonetheless didn’t really feel proper, he returned to the lads’s room, the place he grabbed hand towels and strips of bathroom paper, “and like a crazed person, I ran to my class, put my canvas on the floor, spread torn pieces of towels and tissues … then painted furiously.”
“Janitors at Rest” is a smeary work, with stops and begins, and a scrappy composition that displays the unleashed energies of its invention. Tough collage enabled Andrews to deal with his personal background by means of the textures of the individuals with whom he recognized. Scraps of fabric or crumpled paper grew to become interventions within the historical past of portray, a subversive and insistent technique of encompassing his personal non-White, non-urban roots.
Benny Andrews, “Portrait of Despair” (1985), oil and graphite on canvas with painted material collage
An plain immediacy is obvious in Andrews’s artwork. He balances constructive and destructive area, permitting every painterly transfer to have its personal second whereas leaving stress within the synapses. His figures, with their elongated limbs, convey a deeply thought of vary of human expression. The crumpled paper that kinds the bag in “Bag Woman” (1978), and the bits of fabric that poke out of it, are dangerous units that would simply fail. However as a substitute, they provide a pop of sudden, playful, materials disruption. The work are fastidious and considerate, but relaxed in perspective. There was not one portray on this exhibition that didn’t make me wish to stick with it and soak within the artist’s sudden technique of constructing footage.
Benny Andrews, “Viola Andrews Teaching Sunday School” (1989), oil on canvas with painted material collage
One notable compositional system, in works equivalent to “For Colored Girls” (1977), or “Funeral” (1977), pairs people with vases of flowers. The flowers, hovering within the foreground or to the edges, appear as if small blessings consecrated in bursts of colour. The determine is usually positioned inside an undefined background, permitting the kinds and collaged textures to play brightly, as if on a stage. Andrews’s portraits stretch towards representing sorts as a lot as people (e.g., the mourner, the artist). “Viola Andrews Teaching Sunday School” (1989) exhibits his mom wearing darkish Sunday garments, holding a Bible. Andrews renders her in a full-length pose, traditionally reserved for aristocracy. A flowery, floral purse dangles daintily from her wrist however her fist is clenched. She seems each variety and powerful, directly a singular girl and an emblem of girls who function church and group leaders. Andrews applies scraps of fabric to type her garments, as soon as once more utilizing tough collage to bind the elevated finesse of portray to the locations and histories that inform his life, such because the make-do quilting practices of rural Black communities.
A close-by wall shows a number of self-portraits. We see Andrews as a younger man in his studio in “Studio” (1967). He faces a canvas, holding a brush. His torso is entombed in a pedestal, as if he and the studio are one. His pal Alice Neel is within the background, sitting bare on a plinth, studying a ebook. The ever-present flowers bloom from the picket floorboards. Andrews is a tall, skinny man with a beard. He stares on the canvas with the universally quizzical face of an artist considering his personal work. This piece is surrounded by drawings, a small sculpture, and several other different work of the artist within the studio, in addition to a 1978 lithograph by Neel exhibiting Andrews in a wrinkled work shirt.
4 glass circumstances within the exhibition show archival supplies, together with pictures, journal clippings, present playing cards, essays by Andrews (revealed within the New York Occasions and different publications), and studio artifacts. On prime of every desk are copies that guests can take residence. This strategy retains the artist’s personal phrases and life extra rapid, virtually paralleling his collage methods. One essay discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s now notorious 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Thoughts. It contained no work by Black artists. Andrews picketed the present and cofounded a coalition to demand artwork world fairness and inclusion. He and others would later protest the Whitney Museum’s 1971 Modern Black Artists in America for its lack of Black curatorial involvement.
Set up view of Benny Andrews: Hassle at The Ruth Basis for the Arts (photograph Myrica von Haselberg)
Andrews was a fighter who achieved success and sway within the artwork world, with many exhibits and museum acquisitions. However his work appears much less identified at the moment than a few of his friends, equivalent to Romare Bearden, Howardena Pindell, or Religion Ringgold. Maybe it is because his follow veered from political commentary to portraiture. Or his use of discovered supplies and adherence to figuration impinged on the tendencies towards abstraction and pure portray. Regardless of this, his affect feels palpable, straight or not directly, on subsequent generations of Black figurative artists.
The title for this exhibition, Hassle, comes from Andrews’s studio journal entries dated 1965–72. “Trouble,” he says, is an expression of being alive. To be in bother is to embrace the wrestle and vulnerability of the method, a wall textual content explains. “Try to do what you want to do,” he wrote, “and try as much as possible to do it for yourself.”
Benny Andrews, “Studio” (1967), oil on canvas
Benny Andrews: Hassle continues at Ruth Arts (325 West Florida Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) by means of March 7. The exhibition was organized by Ruth Arts and the Benny Andrews Property.
