Art: “Mr. America”: The Cowboy, the Corpse, and the Collage of Lies

So here’s a fun question:

What happens when you take the American Dream, skin it alive, run it through a meat grinder of racial hypocrisy, stuff it into a too-tight Sunday suit, and slap a Stetson on top?

You get Mr. America—or as Benny Andrews might have called him, “Uncle Sam’s hungover uncle.”

Painted by the ever-underrated, always-unapologetic Benny Andrews, Mr. America doesn’t so much “depict a man” as it unpacks the myth of one, limb by stitched-together limb. With oil, canvas, fabric, and all the rage of a Southern-born Black man who saw the American promise and knew damn well who it was not for, Andrews crafts a figure whose face looks like it’s been hit by Manifest Destiny, Reconstruction, and a Nixon speech—simultaneously.

This is not a painting that flatters. It confronts, peels, cracks, and calls bullsh*t.

Andrews, born in 1930 in segregated Georgia, was the son of sharecroppers and a lifelong fighter. When he wasn’t turning galleries into battlegrounds for civil rights (hello, Black Emergency Cultural Coalition), he was stitching together images like this—portraits of the nation’s underbelly wearing its Sunday best. If Norman Rockwell painted what America thought it looked like, Benny Andrews painted what it felt like to live here on the wrong side of a parade float.

Take a look at that face. Half melting, half screaming, all mask. Mr. America isn’t a man. He’s a construct. A Frankenstein monster sewn from lies about equality, stitched with barbed wire, and shellacked in patriotism. That hat? A caricature of old-school Americana. That suit? Straight from a funeral—maybe his own. Maybe ours.

The beauty of this piece lies in its ugliness. It’s grotesque, yes—but also eerily honest. And let’s be clear: Andrews knew what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to shock. He was trying to wake you the hell up.

In a nation still addicted to slogans, soundbites, and smiling statues, Benny Andrews made a monster—and dared to call it us.

So, the question is: If this is Mr. America, who’s holding the brush now?

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