WITH SIX LARGE FOLIO COLOR ETCHINGS SIGNED BY ARTIST BENNY ANDREWS

(O'CONNOR, Flannery) ANDREWS, Benny. Everything That Rises Must Converge. New York: Limited Editions Club, 2005. Large folio (19-1/2 by 25-1/2 inches), sheets loose as issued; housed in publisher's clamshell box. $5600.

Limited edition, number 2 of only 60 sets of six large folio color etchings by Benny Andrews illustrating one of Flannery O'Connor's best-known short stories, each etching signed and numbered by the artist.

Benny Andrews, "A major force in the art world," is famed for works that are "tough, witty, provocative and always compelling… exemplary of his incisive wit, unflinching eye and compassionate vision. Like his contemporaries Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden, Benny Andrews draws from the rich repository that is Black American culture." His images, like his brother's writings, are rooted in his background as a sharecropper's son, and have become "an instrument of Black memory" (Collage of Benny Andrews, 5, 19). An activist as well as artist, in 1969 he "established the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC),", which targeted major museums to protest "the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from exhibitions and employment, and the under-representation of women" (Patton, African-American Art, 191). In addition to the 60 copies of this limited edition of the portfolio of etchings, there were also 15 proof copies.

Fine condition.