Benny Andrews is a painter who was born in Madison, Georgia on November 13, 1930. He was one of 10 children. He attended Fort Valley State College from 1948 to 1950 and received his art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1954-1958, where he earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree. He has held teaching positions at several colleges and has been the Director of the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts Foundation.

Benny Andrews has also been an activist for African-American artists since the 1960s when he moved to New York. He helped to found an organization called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969 in response to what many artists considered the condescending "Harlem on My Mind" exhibition mounted at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He continued to exhibit leadership in the arts by instituting outreach programs during the early 1980s in prisons, schools, and small towns in the United States.

He has participated in solo and group exhibitions across America since 1959 and has permanent collections at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga; the Hirshorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institute, Wash., D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.; and the O'Hara Museum in Tokyo, Japan, to name a few.

In addition to his solo art work, Benny Andrews has been a guest curator; an illustrator for several books; and an author of numerous articles. He has collaborated with his brother, Raymond, his father, George, and his mother, Viola, on different projects. Andrews passed away on November 10, 2006.