Benny Andrews was one of ten children of sharecropper parents. After a stint in the air force, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, going on to achieve his first New York solo show in 1962. Between 1968 and 1997, Andrews taught painting at Queens College and City University of New York. He was also director of visual arts for the National Endowment of Humanities from 1982 to 1984. His diversely figural paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and many other collections. Andrews died in 2006, leaving his wife, the artist Nene Humphrey, and three children, Christopher, Thomas, and Julia, “To me,” wrote Andrews in an artist’s statement, “everything revolves around the individual. A successful work of a person or people is one that evokes some kind of emotion.”