Benny Andrews was born just outside of Madison, Georgia in 1930 to a family of sharecroppers. He has spoken about the intersectional struggle of growing up poor and Black in a rural community. To attend high school, he had to travel to the one segregated school open to Black students in Madison and graduated as part of a class of only 39 students. After turning 18, he relocated first to Chicago to pursue a fine art education and later to New York City, where he found immense commercial success as an artist.
Andrews frequently traveled back to Georgia and, as such, remained a crucial and frequently exhibited voice across the state’s art landscape in addition to his success in New York. Known for his expressionist figures and use of collaged fabric in his paintings, these works on paper are slightly more muted – but still exemplify his interest in abstraction and form.
Rock and Plower were created as part of Benny Andrews’ Southland series, a period of three years in the late 80’s/early 90’s in which he intentionally traveled back to his studio in Georgia to create new work. His stylistic goal with these works was to “use line sparingly … to contain mass within the form and exaggerate the negative spaces simply by using the thinnest line that [he could] to separate the two (space and form) while also allowing the white of the background (paper) to serve as both form and space interchangeably.” Of the piece Plower, he describes wanting to capture an image of his youth that by the 90’s was virtually non-existent, which was the use of single mules to help plow the field.
