Benny Andrews was born in rural Georgia in 1930. He began his painting practice while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating in 1958, he moved to New York City where he continued his work, developing a technique of rough, expressive collage that incorporated cut fabric and paper into his oil paintings. In 1962, the Forum Gallery mounted his first New York solo exhibition. He went on to develop a reputation as a socially-minded artist and an advocate for greater visibility of African Americans in the art world. For the next four decades, he made and exhibited work in New York, and dedicated himself to activism and education in the community.

Andrews continued his prolific output of artwork, which ranged from explorations of history and social justice to intimate depictions of friends and family, until his death in 2006. Throughout his life, he was adamant that to truly effect social change, making art was not enough. He led art education programs for underserved students through Queens College and local community programs, and implemented a groundbreaking model for teaching art in prisons. In 1969, he co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, which demanded greater visibility for people of color in art museums and the historical canon. He taught at Queens College through the 1990s, stopping briefly, from 1982 to 1984, to serve as the Director of the Visual Arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts. In his final years, Andrews illustrated children's books about the lives of Langston Hughes, W. W. Law, Josephine Carroll Smith, and Civil Rights leader Congressman John Lewis. In the foreword to the 2013 exhibition catalog Benny Andrews: There Must Be a Heaven, Lewis remembered Andrews: