Benny Andrews

Andrews was born into a sharecropping family in Georgia and went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating in 1958, he settled in New York, becoming well known for his figurative mixed media collages and line drawings. He was also renowned as an activist, co-founding the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969. This sheet belongs to an epic cycle of works created between 1970 and 1975 called "The Bicentennial Series." Consisting of six themes -- Symbolism, Trash, Sexism, War, Circle, and Utopia -- the series was Andrews' response to plans for America's bicentennial celebrations, which were already underway in 1970. He said, "The government had already planned to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars to bicentennial projects. For white America, the full spectrum of their lives would be shown ... But for Black people, the emphasis would be on restorations of the Old Slave Mart, country churches, and slave cabins. There would be those typical capsulated histories of great 'Negro firsts,' and that would be it. The only statement made that would represent us as a group would be that once we were slaves, but now we're not." This sheet belongs to the second theme in the cycle, Trash. The final, twelve-part painting is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Inspired in part by Andrews' horror at the Attica Prison uprising in 1971, the monumental painting depicts three Black men, two of whom are bound by ropes or chains, pulling a procession of degraded American values to a junkyard. This black and white ink study depicts a figure that Andrews referred to as "false Liberty" sitting atop a pedestal. In one hand she holds a book, probably the Bible (Andrews was critical or organized religion) and in the other a torch. A stark shadow image transforms the flaccid flame into what appears to be the severed head of a Black child. Phallic, headless soldiers sit at the foot of the pedestal, part of Andrews' critique of American militarism. A trail of paper trash bags containing infants extends from the foreground back to the horizon. Andrews later wrote, "Trash wasn't just about Attica, but about the failure of American institutions, such as the church and the government, to respond to the massacre. I called it taking all the American values to the trash."