"Newark Industrial Exposition", Poster Design Celebrating the American Worker

Gerrit Albertus Beneker was born on January 26, 1882, at Grand Rapids, Michigan. He studied with John Vanderpoel, Frederick Richardson, F. V. DuMond, Henry Reuterdahl and Charles W. Hawthorne. He was a member of the Provincetown Art Association and the Beachcombers Club. Beneker exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1913–32 and in the Scarab Club, Detroit, in 1916, the Cleveland Museum in 1919, the Corcoran Gallery from 1919–32 and the Detroit Institute of Art in 1930. He had worked in institutions like Provincetown Art Association, Butler Institute of American Art, Grand Rapids Art Gallery and Victory Liberty Loan poster. He also worked as a painter of magazine covers for Leslie's Weekly, The Reader, Scribner's Magazine, The Christian Herald and Harper's Weekly. In 1919, he was a painter in residence for The Hydraulic Steel Company in Cleveland, where for two years he painted the steelworkers of America. He died on October 23, 1934, at Truro, Massachusetts.