Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

The son of black sharecroppers, Benny Andrews was the first member of his family to graduate from high school. Always passionate about drawing, he developed a distinctive linear style inspired by illustration, comics, and folk art. A social realist, Andrews drew from his imagination, including memories of his childhood in Plainview, Georgia. This image (the first by the artist to enter our collection) shows his father reading the newspaper under a poster of the boxer Joe Louis, whom Andrews described as godlike to the black community. Andrews’s own fighting spirit led him in 1969 to co-found the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC), which strove to have more works by black artists shown in major museums