Migrants
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
April 18–August 7, 2026
New York
Benny Andrews’s “The Migrant Series”, completed between 2004 and the artist’s death in 2006, can be divided into a tripartite set: the migration undertaken by the Cherokee during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and ’40s, the <a href="https://absafricatv9491.live-website.com/fifa-africa-office-opens-in-rabat-a-global-football-impact/” title=”FIFA Africa Office Opens in Rabat: A Global Football Impact”>African-American Great Migration of 1910–70, and the California-bound American migrants of the Great Depression-era Dust Bowl. On the one hand, Andrews was galvanized by the realist tradition, the Harlem Renaissance, and the American gothic literature that he ardently read. Significantly, the project was also wrapped up in Andrews’s mixed heritage (Andrews was of African-American, Cherokee, and Scotch-Irish descent) and thus retains a biographical nature. Such is the case with much of Andrews’s oeuvre, which perennially found the artist recording history—past and present. The “Migrant” compositions, with works like Corner Greeters (2004), are optically delectable. Andrews chose to set the “Trail of Tears” subseries in unconfined and outstretched outdoor spaces, which have the effect of almost miniaturizing—and thereby depersonalizing—his subjects. Cast with overhanging blush-swept and lemon-glazed vapors, its blue skies almost swallow the grounded exile whole. Andrews’s fine pictorialism evidences that his concerns have as little to do with formalism as they do with pictorial delights. For however much balance and aesthetic merit the works enjoy, the paintings are, at their core, humanist reflections. Indeed, though Andrews consorted with Abstract Expressionists like Norman Lewis, he thoroughly resisted the spasmodic inadvertence of Action painting, instead preferring a more observational and quiet practice—one that was patient and studious, and anchored in preparative research rather than phenomenological or formalist contentions. With his “Migrant” series, Andrews achieves a significant feat in producing a series of excellently executed modernist history paintings that implicate the artist’s own autobiography while providing testimony to historical adversity.
Much of his work is investigatory and thematically circumscribed. His “Autobiographical Series” was prompted by a trip through his home state of Georgia in 1966, and is punctuated by homages to Civil Rights activists like John Lewis and W.W. Law. His mid-1990s “Revival Series” drawings were made from church services held at the Plainview Baptist Church near Madison, Georgia. Each series is quite original, with the artist adroitly shifting from what he deemed a Surrealism-endowed prismatic rendering of the Black experience. He once remarked that “Surrealism can get out of hand real fast, but then the Black experience is so ridiculous that Surrealism is the best way to express it.” However, he also commanded a more restrained style when depicting the faceless congregants in flattened silhouettes. Where subjects, motifs, and styles might vary, Andrews’s figurative-documentary approach frequently arcs towards a particularly expressive incarnation of social realism.
In an informative oral history interview from June 30, 1968, Andrews notes that, during the Depression, his family lost everything. His father, George (also known by his “Dot Man” sobriquet) was a sharecropper, who was later recognized as a talented self-taught painter and worked for the WPA. However, he hardly made any money. Andrews then recounts his childhood, during which his white grandfather spurned his African-American grandchildren, spoke to them “in the third-party,” and freely deployed racial slurs in their presence. These experiences impelled his interest in American race relations, which, in turn, informed his broader curiosity about not only the Great Migration but socioculturally relevant American migration waves more broadly. Thus, in June 2004 he trekked westward, traversing the landscape of the Dust Bowl; and then, almost one year later, the Trail of Tears. Andrews consulted archival annals and historical societies on his drives along Route 66, which stretches from Oklahoma to California and, subsequently, through the Carolinas and his native Georgia. Ultimately, however, the ensuing paintings became composites of amalgamated sites and historical figures. Recurrent leitmotifs include gangling, wary travelers and “Okie” families, sheathed in denim overalls and burlap layers. Some change tires, some plod beside tortuous train tracks, and others, as in the subjects peopling Migrant Camp(2004), huddle with their fellow man in threadbare Hooverville campsites that are bestrewn with improvised shanties and capped by rusted, corrugated steel lamina.
One can and ought to spend a significant amount of time parsing the details of Andrews’s modernist history paintings, for it is only through such patient viewing that one begins to appreciate Andrews’s schematic manipulation of collage surfaces. The forlorn, desert-strewn roamers are frequently cast beside their cargo-laden cars. Their hollow faces turn away from our gaze. They are enthralling enough, and convey the somber gravity of these scenes, which are deepened by Andrews’s masterful use of his “rough collage” technique. He began developing this approach in 1957, during his final year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where, after serving in the Korean War, Andrews enrolled through the GI Bill. It is significant that Andrews developed it while producing his Janitors at Rest(1957–58), which looked to the school’s custodial staff as a subject.
This late “Migrant” series evinces Andrews’s dexterous command of the collagist approach that he refined over the course of almost five decades. Rather than appending gleaned detritus like candy wrappers or recognizable advertisements to the pictorial surface as an epochal Pop artist might have, Andrews’s preferred “rough collage” involves attenuating and integrating paper or fabric to the surface of the picture plane. Curators like Jessica Bell Brown have underscored that Andrews’s collage elements are, in fact, cultivated from everyday life and license the separation of physical and psychological space while dealing with vernacular imagery. However, the fertility of Andrews’s collage strategy lies in his ability to absorb (rather than marginalize) his collage materials, and his ability to integrate them into their surroundings such that they function as dimensionally-raised representational elements. That is, those threaded portions that are sewn into the canvas do not stand against that which they are posited atop, but instead license cragged protuberance jutting from a hill or blazoned satchels hurled from a truck bed. Be they denim patches or fabric sequins, the plotted collage scraps materially extend verisimilitude and surface textures. Dimensionally raising elements like sun-worn leather shoes, or, as is frequently the case in the “Migrant” series, sandy sackcloths, the collage components do not stand against their backdrop but serve as its extensions. That is, Andrews’s “rough collaging” is part and parcel of integrating an observed vantage or expanse with bumps and ridges that, viewed from afar, are hardly identifiable. Indeed, it is only upon closely observing a work like Desert Burial(2004) that the percipient notices bas-relief-like sacks perturbating from the gaunt, bowed mourners’ dusted-silver Ford Model T and its overstuffed trunk. In subtilizing the limned scenes, Andrews’s tracts encourage us to glance from varied views, adjusting between machines, masses, and plains. The collage entreats us to view Andrews’s rolling ranges with the very studied insistence that served as the artist’s own painterly impetus.
Andrews’s idiosyncratic social realism is quite distinct from that of Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, or Jack Levine. Where the latter three artists populated their canvases with bulbous, almost caricature-proportioned faces that were often bustling and bumping together in unwashed metropolitan streets, Andrews, even in works affixed to astir New York City centers like Harlem USA(2004)or his Cotton Club Study #2and #4 (both 2004), affixes upon a sparse number of painterly subjects. Again, his is a quiet, deliberate form of depiction. Admittedly, some paintings feature a dozen or so figures, but they are each slivered, allowing for the airy, multi-hued backdrop to inch them out into intervals that successfully facilitate a “distancing” or “alienating effect.” Compared to the relations between the subjects, the figures’ pocked expressions, often only indicated with a dot or drag of paint, are of secondary importance. Many of the works return to epochal racial relations—a frequent theme for the artist who also was a lifelong civil and social activist. In Cotton Club Study #4,for example, a woman—perhaps a stand-in for Ella Fitzgerald, who frequently performed in the famed 125th Street club alongside Duke Ellington—sings in a coral-shell dress and V-shaped ruby shoes before two white diners. An African-American server nimbly balances a martini before another elegantly dressed Caucasian couple. In the foreground and background, lavishly dressed couples—none of whose expressions we can quite make out—relish the performance. We find Andrews turning and returning to race-based socioeconomic division in the other Cotton Clubworks, which feature seated, anonymized white audience members flanking elastic, sinuous Black performers. Andrews reifies the same theme also in paintings like Northward Bound(2004). Here, two clusters of travelers pool into separate queues under a rural railroad depot’s wooden platform reading “Plainview,” the name of Andrews’s Georgia hometown. The leftmost plot, all African-Americans, heavily outnumbers the two white couples. On the other side of the tracks, a Black family of three—two of their faces buried in straw hats—voyages northward as the title suggests.
It is curious that Emily Genauer, in a 1970 New York Postreview, countenanced Benny Andrews as “the best example” of what she deemed a “new form of social realism”—one that, she argued, proffered a message that “can’t be told in traditional forms because they’re part of an outworn system belonging to and symbolizing a past which must be discarded.” Although Andrews was certainly critical of racial injustices and politically keen, this all-too-reductive interpretation fails to account for the patient and almost stoic autobiographical chronicling that comprises the essence of these elegiac works. Andrews’s work is hardly galvanized by a uniform sense of “discarding” American history past.
