Benny Andrews, Mrs. Viola Andrews – My Mother, c. 1974, 60 1/8 x 48 1/8 x 1 1/2 in., oil with fabric collage on canvas, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick.
Benny Andrews, Mrs. Viola Andrews
Benny Andrews grew up in the rural South of America in Plainview, Georgia to an impoverished family that worked on a cotton picking farm. In this piece Andrew depicts his mother with a cotton plant snaking up her cane, a nod to the family’s humble roots. Viola Andrews held her son in high regard his entire life and, against the odds, made all ten of her children go to school. This emphasis on education allowed Andrews to become the first in his family to graduate high school, as well as college. Andrews claims his mother emphasized education above all else, and as a sharecropper, pushed her children towards education as their way towards a better life. We see the representation of mother as a role model who overcame her own struggles to support her children.
Andrews depicts his mother as a strong, stalwart woman who, despite her slight frame, is not fragile but enigmatic, commanding. This is its own kind of idealization, but it is not her beauty that is emphasized, but her strength. She is admired for the way she protected and aided her family in overcoming unforgiving odds, and Andrew’s use of geometric forms lends her stature this solidity and strength. Andrews honors his mother as a role model and memorializes her as a strong woman who could do it all, while still fulfilling the societal expectations of motherhood.