American Icons
Benny Andrews is a painter, printmaker, cultural leader and arts advocate. His work is in the permanent collections of well over 30 major museums, including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute. Born into a sharecropper family in 1930 in Madison, Georgia, he is an African American who considers himself a product of his American social and cultural environment. Though he has lived in New York City for the past 40 years, his art still reflects the experiences and memories he associates with his family life in the South (he still maintains a studio in Georgia).