Sweet Back Man

Part of a series of works based on the life of poet Langston Hughes, this drawing depicts two children looking up at a monumental figure dressed in a dapper suit, hat, and bow tie and carrying a pink walking cane. He is the "sweet back man" of the work’s title, an African American colloquialism of the early twentieth century used to refer to an attractive and well-dressed male. Andrews might have encountered such a smartly attired person in the South, where he was raised. Most of his subjects draw on individuals and experiences gleaned from his childhood and range from allegorical portraits to anecdotal scenes.

Andrews rose from impoverished conditions as a child in rural Georgia and survived the anti-Black discrimination of the Jim Crow South to become a leading figurative painter of American life and a social justice advocate. After serving in the Korean War, Andrews studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, using funds from the GI Bill, and moved to New York in 1958. There he developed his signature style of "rough collage," combining bits of paper and fabric onto his painted canvases to build up the surface in extreme relief, a technique employed in this work. With collage as his primary medium, Andrews took up a typically European modernist artform as a possible way to counteract the appropriation of Black art by modern artists.

This sensibility for social justice permeated his work. Andrews advocated strongly for diversity in museums and for artists’ rights, and in 1969 cofounded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in response to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ill-conceived show Harlem on My Mind, an exhibition that purported to celebrate the creative achievements of that neighborhood, but which excluded any work by Black artists.