Kathleen Benson's (John Lewis in the Lead) picture-book biography introduces Benny Andrews (1930–2006), demonstrating how he lived his life as much as how he created his artwork.
Benson opens with Andrews's 2005 trip to New Orleans to work with children after Hurricane Katrina. "He showed them how to draw pictures of what they had seen, to use art to express their feelings about what they had been through," she writes, words to live by for Andrews himself, judging from the dozen compositions here. The author lets Andrews's oil-and-fabric collages carry his story and uses economical text to fill in the facts. "He drew hot suns and red clay and little wood-frame houses in the middle of cotton fields that stretched as far as he could see," she writes of his childhood in Plainview, Ga. A description of Benny's graduation from high school, his entry to college on a scholarship and his enlistment in the Air Force ("he knew there was a bigger world waiting for him") finds the perfect accompaniment in his The Promised Land (2004). A car, laden with luggage, departs a barren landscape and approaches flowering trees. The book illuminates the way Andrews's commitment to exposing on canvas the sorrows and joys of African American life mirrored his activism in the streets and his passion for teaching artists at community centers, schools and prisons. "He believed that art was for everyone," Benson writes.
Andrews's artwork and his story will inspire children to "draw what they see" and live out their dreams. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness