Benny Andrews Portraits: A real person before the eyes

Author: Connie Choi, Jessica Bell Brown
Publisher: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
Year: 2020
Pages: 183
ISBN: 978-1930416628

Benny Andrews: Portraits, A Real Person Before the Eyes traces Andrews’ commitment to portraiture throughout his career. Featuring new scholarship by Jessica Bell Brown, Associate Curator for Contemporary Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Connie H. Choi, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Kyle Williams, Director of the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation, this book includes an expanded artist chronology with never-before-published photographs that narrate the life and career of Benny Andrews. Here are a few text excerpts:

  Taken together, these various works signal what it means to be at once the beholder and the image-maker, to open new portals for irreducible sensibilities unique to those being portrayed. Andrews’ empathetic brush has, over the course of time, straddled the line between inventiveness and observation and honed the ability to truly grapple with all the complexities of identity and self-making. In this contemporary moment of evident and renewed socio-political reckoning, Andrews’ portraits are faithful models for holding space for the expansiveness of subjectivity and personhood in American art.

—Jessica Bell Brown

Andrews’ dedication to figuration, begun during the rise of abstraction in the 1950s and steadfastly honed over the next fifty years…aligned with [his] dedication to social justice and advocacy for the visibility of people of color. As such, his contributions to the black figurative tradition are immeasurable, as is his influence on generations of artists working through their own interventions on the art historical canon. Collectively, these artists critically empower the black subject, emphasize and interrogate shared cultural legacies, and push against the historic limitations of figuration. Andrews, with his vital artistic and political contributions, arguably stands at the center of these continued and necessary investigations into black representation.

—Connie H. Choi