MILWAUKEE — Benny Andrews was a painter, as well as an activist, an art educator in prisons, and an inspiration to many Black artists. He made figurative paintings utilizing a technique he called “rough collage,” where he selectively built up parts of the composition with paper or fabric. Prior to his death in 2006, at the age of 75, he organized a foundation to preserve his studio in Brooklyn and oversee his estate. Trouble at Ruth Arts, the exhibition space run by the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, was organized in collaboration with the Benny Andrews Estate. The exhibition is beautifully situated in this newly renovated space of brick walls and natural light. Most of the works are portraits. Paintings that more directly comment on race and politics, such as “No More Games” (1970) in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, are absent here. Yet every aspect of Andrews’s life involved fighting and caring for his own community, and the portraits reflect this. Andrews was interested in art as a child, growing up in a sharecropper family in Georgia with nine siblings. After serving in the Korean War, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), receiving his BFA in 1958. It was at SAIC that he began incorporating found materials into his paintings; the earliest work in this show, “Janitors at Rest” (1957–58), presciently established his style for the remainder of his career. Benny Andrews, “For Colored Girls” (1977), oil on canvas with painted fabric collageAndrews was one of nine Black students at SAIC in the 1950s. He was also one of the few committed to figurative work while Abstract Expressionism reigned. He wrote in an unpublished essay, included in the show’s handouts, that he was not popular and didn’t get invited to social events. Instead, he found kinship with the school’s custodial staff, who were Black and also from the South. Andrews would visit them, where they hung out in the men’s room, to chat and share a sip of whiskey. The custodians’ calloused hands and worn overalls, he said, felt familiar. The day he had his creative breakthrough, he had gone down the hall from his painting class to chat with them. “I went back to my class and started painting my idea of them,” he wrote. When the painting still didn’t feel right, he returned to the men’s room, where he grabbed hand towels and strips of toilet paper, “and like a crazed person, I ran to my class, put my canvas on the floor, spread torn pieces of towels and tissues … then painted furiously.”“Janitors at Rest” is a smeary work, with stops and starts, and a scrappy composition that reflects the unleashed energies of its invention. Rough collage enabled Andrews to address his own background through the textures of the people with whom he identified. Scraps of cloth or crumpled paper became interventions in the history of painting, a subversive and insistent means of encompassing his own non-White, non-urban roots. Benny Andrews, “Portrait of Despair” (1985), oil and graphite on canvas with painted fabric collageAn undeniable immediacy is evident in Andrews’s art. He balances positive and negative space, allowing each painterly move to have its own moment while leaving tension in the synapses. His figures, with their elongated limbs, convey a deeply considered range of human expression. The crumpled paper that forms the bag in “Bag Woman” (1978), and the bits of cloth that poke out of it, are risky devices that could easily fail. But instead, they offer a pop of unexpected, playful, material disruption. The paintings are fastidious and thoughtful, yet relaxed in attitude. There was not one painting in this exhibition that didn’t make me want to stay with it and soak in the artist’s unexpected means of building pictures. Benny Andrews, “Viola Andrews Teaching Sunday School” (1989), oil on canvas with painted fabric collageOne notable compositional device, in works such as “For Colored Girls” (1977), or “Funeral” (1977), pairs individuals with vases of flowers. The flowers, hovering in the foreground or to the sides, appear like small blessings consecrated in bursts of color. The figure is often placed within an undefined background, allowing the forms and collaged textures to play brightly, as if on a stage. Andrews’s portraits stretch toward representing types as much as individuals (e.g., the mourner, the artist). “Viola Andrews Teaching Sunday School” (1989) shows his mother dressed in dark Sunday clothes, holding a Bible. Andrews renders her in a full-length pose, historically reserved for aristocracy. A fancy, floral purse dangles daintily from her wrist but her fist is clenched. She appears both kind and strong, at once a singular woman and a symbol of women who serve as church and community leaders. Andrews applies scraps of cloth to form her clothes, once again using rough collage to bind the elevated finesse of painting to the places and histories that inform his life, such as the make-do quilting practices of rural Black communities. A nearby wall displays multiple self-portraits. We see Andrews as a young man in his studio in “Studio” (1967). He faces a canvas, holding a brush. His torso is entombed in a pedestal, as if he and the studio are one. His friend Alice Neel is in the background, sitting naked on a plinth, reading a book. The ever-present flowers bloom from the wooden floorboards. Andrews is a tall, skinny guy with a beard. He stares at the canvas with the universally quizzical face of an artist contemplating his own work. This piece is surrounded by drawings, a small sculpture, and several other paintings of the artist in the studio, as well as a 1978 lithograph by Neel showing Andrews in a wrinkled work shirt. Four glass cases in the exhibition display archival materials, including photographs, magazine clippings, show cards, essays by Andrews (published in the New York Times and other publications), and studio artifacts. On top of each table are copies that visitors can take home. This approach keeps the artist’s own words and life more immediate, almost paralleling his collage strategies. One essay discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s now infamous 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind. It contained no work by Black artists. Andrews picketed the show and cofounded a coalition to demand art world equity and inclusion. He and others would later protest the Whitney Museum’s 1971 Contemporary Black Artists in America for its lack of Black curatorial involvement.Installation view of Benny Andrews: Trouble at The Ruth Foundation for the Arts (photo Myrica von Haselberg)Andrews was a fighter who achieved success and sway in the art world, with many shows and museum acquisitions. But his work seems less known today than some of his peers, such as Romare Bearden, Howardena Pindell, or Faith Ringgold. Perhaps this is because his practice veered from political commentary to portraiture. Or his use of found materials and adherence to figuration impinged on the trends toward abstraction and pure painting. Despite this, his influence feels palpable, directly or indirectly, on subsequent generations of Black figurative artists. The title for this exhibition, Trouble, comes from Andrews’s studio journal entries dated 1965–72. “Trouble,” he says, is an expression of being alive. To be in trouble is to embrace the struggle and vulnerability of the process, a wall text explains. “Try to do what you want to do,” he wrote, “and try as much as possible to do it for yourself.” Benny Andrews, “Studio” (1967), oil on canvasBenny Andrews: Trouble continues at Ruth Arts (325 West Florida Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) through March 7. The exhibition was organized by Ruth Arts and the Benny Andrews Estate.