CRISSCROSSES: BENNY ANDREWS AND THE POETRY OF LANGSTON HUGHES
CURATED BY NADIA SCOTT

Crisscrosses: Benny Andrews and the Poetry of Langston Hughes features a selection of illustrations that Andrews (1930-2006) created a year before his passing for the publication Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes. Andrews is perhaps best known for two things: his built-up oil and collage canvases and his activism in the late 1960s and 70s, demanding that New York City museums exhibit and hire more women and people of color. However, illustration was always part of Andrews's artistic practice, from his work on the 1968 poetry collection I Am the Darker Brother to his brother Raymond's novels and a series of children's picture books published in the early 2000s. 

The illustrations highlight Andrews' lifelong dedication to bringing fine art to spaces beyond galleries and museums, connections he referred to as the "crisscrosses" of his practice. For example, he led art classes in New York prisons and detention centers through his work with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, taught art in the "Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge" program at Queens College, and created a series specifically for the Plainview Baptist Church in his native Morgan County, Georgia. By creating work for children's books, Andrews was able to reach kids and their families in their own homes, schools, and libraries. Andrews used his art as a tool for political activism and community building. His approach illuminates the importance of including the arts when creating interdisciplinary solutions to the interdisciplinary problems of our society.  

Crisscrosses explores the "collaboration" between the self-described "people's painter" and Langston Hughes, "the people's poet." The pairing of the two artists, who never met, represents the continued use of social realism by Black American artists to illuminate socio-political concerns facing their people. Both artists used their respective mediums to reach new audiences and encourage them to engage intimately with their work. In these deceptively simple illustrations, Andrews creates dynamic worlds for Hughes' words to live in. At times, these works are literal representations of the poetry, but the majority reflect Andrews' personal interpretations. His creative liberty in translating Hughes' poems gives audiences young and old the space to find their own ways of connecting with and exploring the joys, tragedies, and sorrows of the Black American experience found in the poet's verse. 

Andrews first began illustrating while studying for his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he took technical figure-drawing classes, a skill he practiced by drawing from life in parks and jazz clubs. But Andrews also developed an ability to draw from his imagination as easily as rendering something directly in front of him. During this time, he also did commercial work for various music companies, illustrating their record covers. All of these experiences helped Andrews develop a consistent contour line that he takes with him throughout his career, evidenced in these two images created almost a decade apart.

Jazz and blues heavily inspired both Andrews and Hughes, with musicality being a consistent theme in their work. While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Andrews would often draw jazz bands as they performed. He developed a distinct style of capturing movement that conveyed the rhythms of the music. Blues and jazz also influenced Hughes’s writing style, with its colloquial language and rhythmic flow. “The Weary Blues” is one of the first poems Hughes wrote that incorporated these musical motifs. Like the blues, Hughes’s work explores themes of sorrow, resilience, and cultural identity. The poem “Hey!,” along with its companion “Hey! Hey!,” exemplify his use of the blues lyric form in his poetry, incorporating repetition and variation to evoke the emotional intensity of these musical genres.

In many of his poems, Hughes articulates the sense of isolation that comes with being a Black American. Andrews mirrors this tone in his illustrations, constructing somber lone figures. This theme of loneliness is juxtaposed with poems like “Walkers with the Dawn,” which emphasize the resistance and resilience of the Black American community. Andrews captures the importance of community in his two central figures who joyously stretch across the page, embracing and smiling at each other with a dance-like quality. The woman’s head is thrown back in laughter, a drastic departure from what we see in Love Gone Wrong or Brick Wall. In Walker with the Dawn Andrews illustrates the pride, fearlessness, and hope that can come with building and relying on community.

The illustration for “I, Too” is one of the few examples in the series of a joyous solo figure, and an even rarer example of Andrews’s illustration taking a drastically different tone than that of the poem it illustrates. Hughes’s “I, Too” is a powerful and defiant poem that affirms the belonging of Black Americans despite attempts to position them as second class citizens. It presents a vision of hope and inclusion in which all Americans have the same rights and are treated with dignity. The poem’s tone is optimistic yet heartbreaking, its narrator on the outside, aching to be included. Andrews, however, creates an untroubled, gleeful figure who stretches across the page, taking up as much space as possible. The poem becomes a grand proclamation of belonging. The figure, and by extension Hughes, are no longer waiting to be let in but bursting through the door themselves, taking up space in a country where they have historically been excluded.

The feeling of simultaneously being connected and disconnected to Africa is a cornerstone of the Black American experience that has consistently been explored by Black creatives. In both Afro-American Fragments and I’ve Known Rivers, the larger-than- life figures attempt to span the distance between the diaspora and motherland. The centering of water in the compositions highlights the complex relationship Black Americans have with the element. Large bodies of water like the Atlantic Ocean and Mississippi River facilitated and prolonged the institution of chattel slavery in the United States; furthering the distance between families and homelands. Yet, water also serves as a symbol of freedom and point of connection with the African continent.

I was always amazed at how much Matisse could get between two lines.

—Benny Andrews, 1973

In Still Here, the harshest of image in the series, Andrews avoids graphic imagery and complex symbolism; instead, he is intentional with what he chooses to fit between the lines. The figure’s raised shoulders, gaping mouth, clenched fingers, and scrunched eyes convey an overwhelming sense of pain and despair, almost as if he is howling in pain. The level of expression achieved in Andrew’s line work conveys so much about the toll that racism has taken on Black Americans, but in a way that’s still appropriate for his young audience.

Andrews’s intentionality with his line mirrors Hughes’s poetry. Hughes is known for his simple and “unsophisticated” use of language. He wrote in the way that people spoke. Many of his poems, like “Still Here” are quite brief. The perceived simplicity of the illustrations and poems is what makes both artists so approachable to new audiences and to young people. Their work is for everyone it is not overly self-important. The quality of Andrew’s illustrations demonstrates a high level of respect for his young audience. He took them seriously and produced work that would challenge them to be critical art viewers, whether the art was on the pages of a book or the walls of a gallery.