Benny Andrews was born in Madison, Georgia in 1930. He is a painter, writer, printmaker, sculptor, book illustrator and teacher. His art, like his background, is complex and multi-faceted.

Andrews grew up in the rural south, one of ten children in a sharecropper's family. Always a visionary, Andrews studied at Fort Valley State College and later received his BFA from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1968 to 1997, he taught at Queens College and from 1982 to 1984, Andrews served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exhibited nationally and internationally for over forty years, Andrews' work can be found in the permanent collections of numerous museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Museum in New York; The Hirshhorn Museum, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago and The Detroit Institute in Illinois and The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California. Benny Andrews is currently on the Board of the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

The work of Benny Andrews is narrative and passionate and always carries a message. He is a storyteller at heart. Collage has always been a sustaining umbilical medium for the artist and it is somewhere between surrealism and social realism that his work resides. A master draftsman, Andrews imbues his line drawings with a rare vitality and fervor.