Benny Andrews (American/Georgia, 1930-2006), "Chess", 1964, oil and collage on board, signed, titled and dated lower left, "The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, Charleston, SC" label on backing, sight 14 3/4 in. x 10 3/4 in., framed. Provenance: The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, Charleston, SC; Collection of Noted Preservationist and Aesthete Dorian M. Bennett, New Orleans.Note: Benny Andrews was born in 1930 to a mixed-race family in rural Georgia. After becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school, he attended Fort Valley State College supported by a scholarship as he was not allowed to attend the University of Georgia due to the color of his skin. After serving as a military policeman in the Korean War, Andrews utilized the G.I. Bill to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. For the first time, Andrews was able to enter an art museum and view original art, an experience that would inspire a lifetime of his own work. After graduating in 1958, Andrews moved to New York, where he maintained a studio for the rest of his life. Despite limited connections to the city’s art world, he began to exhibit regularly at the Forum Gallery by 1962, where his first solo exhibition received favorable reviews in the New York Times. Within his first six years of residence in New York, Andrews became an established artist. His work was accepted for exhibition in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Provincetown. During the 1960s, Andrews also became increasingly active with the Civil Rights Movement, protesting institutional racism on picket lines at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art and co-founding the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969, which demanded greater visibility for people of color in art museums and within the historical canon. Andrews developed a reputation as a socially minded artist dedicated to community activism and education. "Chess" offered here is a powerful example of the canvases behind Andrews' early success in New York, and it makes clear why his figurative works are among his most memorable subjects. As Catherine Fox wrote of Andrews: "His art was stubbornly figurative when abstraction was boss, hot when art was cool. He bridled at being pigeonholed as a 'black artist,' lambasting critics for 'not being able to see a black figure done by a black artist without automatically assuming that the work is propagandistic or politicizing.' Whatever the color of his characters' skins, his subject was the human spirit." Early in his career, Andrews developed a technique of roughly incorporating collaged fabric and paper into his paintings, and this "rough collage" became a stylistic hallmark of his work. He had clearly mastered this technique by the time he created "Chess" in 1964, as areas of the scene emerge from the canvas towards the viewer with a strong three-dimensional quality. The red chess pieces stand in stark contrast to the black and white board and loom in front of the figure almost as if on a surrealist landscape. Throughout his career Benny Andrews's painting practice combined elements of figuration, abstraction and surrealism. His subject matter ranged from personal narrative and cultural history to political allegory. Andrews' work is the subject of an ongoing permanent collection exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art celebrating one of the South’s greatest voices in the visual arts, and the newly re-opened and expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York currently has on exhibit Andrews' "No More Games" of 1971 from its permanent collection. Ref.: Fox, Catherine. "Benny Andrews: 1930-2006: Native Georgian Illustrated America's Soul." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nov. 12, 2006. Gruber, Richard J. American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Sims, Lowery Stokes. Benny Andrews: From Earth to Heaven and Back. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2013. "Overview" and "Gallery and Exhibitions." Benny Andrews Estate. www.bennyandrews.com. Accessed July 26, 2020.