Behind the story and the beautiful art lies another story – the rich friendship of Benny Andrews and John Lewis.
Join us on Sunday, February 18th from 2- 4pm for a opening program for The John Lewis Series: Paintings by Benny Andrews in the MMCC Auditorium.
An exhibit featuring 17 paintings by Benny Andrews depicting the life of late U.S Congressman John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement. They appeared in John Lewis in the Lead: A Story of the Civil Rights Movement by Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson, a prize-winning book published in 2006 for young readers.
Nene Humphries, Benny’s widow, believes Benny and John met when they were young men and Andrew’s mother, Viola was active at a Baptist church in Atlanta. “They were country boys, and they were reared up in the segregated South and they just clicked and became friends,” says Benny’s sister, Shirley Andrews Lowrie.
Lowrie also remembers that when they got together, they would reminisce over civil rights marches and lunch center demonstrations. Both particularly enjoyed reliving a story that Lewis often told audiences about his youth in Troy, Alabama. He said at the time he was so enamored of his faith that he would preach to the chickens. Andrews painted this scene as one of the pieces in the book.
The John Lewis series was one of Benny’s final bodies of work. According to Lewis, “there was no line where his activism ended, and his art began. To him, using his brush and his pen to capture the essence and spirit of his time was as much an act of protest as sitting-in or sitting-down was for me.”
After Benny died of cancer Lewis spoke at his funeral at the Cooper Union college in New York. “I loved Benny Andrews. I loved him because he was real. He was not shadows. He was not hazy memories or a misty fog of secrets. He was as real and steady as the red clay hills of Georgia, as real as the deep chocolate earth of a fertile land.”