Cargo (Study for Symbols) 1970

Curator: Here we have Benny Andrews’s 1970 pencil drawing, “Cargo (Study for Symbols).” Editor: The rawness of it gets me. It's just bare lines on paper, like a half-remembered dream etched quickly before it fades completely. Curator: I see it too. Andrews has this amazing knack for capturing really complex social commentaries in what look like simple forms. It's a study, an idea—and ideas, like feelings, aren't always neatly packaged. Editor: Definitely. The tilted stretcher bearing an unsettling flag design… it evokes this very specific sense of displaced patriotism. Like, what are we carrying? What’s the real “cargo” here? The symbols almost mock the solemnity you might expect. Curator: That image on the flag really gets to me. Stars and...is that supposed to be Uncle Sam’s head, maybe? Disfigured? There’s an incredible tension between the seeming nonchalance of the drawing style, its sparseness, and the weighty theme of national identity under duress. Editor: There’s such vulnerability in the faces too. They’re not idealized figures, are they? It feels so immediate. And that blank space above, weighing down on everything below—heavy silence. Curator: And yet, there's a sense of movement. These men aren't statues. They’re bearing something. The title makes it sound like necessary baggage, maybe—a necessary, awful responsibility. I’d like to see that sketch be part of a finished painting someday. Editor: Agreed. It’s haunting and the more you observe it the more emotionally taxing it seems, not because it demands that you feel this or that, but it stirs in you many questions. Andrews’s raw strokes expose the bones beneath our culture, don’t they? Curator: They do indeed. Even unfinished, there's such a depth. It's less about finding answers, and more about sitting with those troubling questions together.