Operation SEEK: Finding New Pathways for Collegiate & Carceral Cross-Education in the Archive of artist Benny Andrews (1930-2006) 

Sinclair Spratley is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University. She is the 2024 recipient of the Benny Andrews Award, which provides funding for researchers exploring the collection of visual artist, teacher, activist, critic, and writer Benny Andrews.

I had the privilege of spending time in the vast and diverse collected papers of the painter Benny Andrews, an artist who can best be described as indefatigable. My purpose for visiting the Benny Andrews papers at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library was to conduct research for my dissertation, a project where I am exploring artistic responses to and movement around the shift towards a more punitive politics in the criminal justice system in the United States in the 1970s. As one of the co-founders of the artist-activist organization the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), Andrews helped establish art workshops in prisons and jails across the United States, as a response to the bloody squashing of the Attica Prison Rebellion in September 1971. While my dissertation will focus on a broad array of responses and perspectives to this historical moment, Andrews was a key leader in galvanizing support and visibility for incarcerated people in the art world. Spending time in Andrews’s papers at the Stuart A. Rose Library connected one facet of Andrews’s diverse career, his time as an art instructor at Queens College, to his activist work with New York City’s jails and prisons in the form of his participation as a faculty member in the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program at Queens College. It is in his archive that an image of Andrews as an artist deeply engaged in pedagogical pathways for harnessing the creative and intellectual power of oppressed people emerges. 

Andrews joined SEEK and Queens College in 1968 and was involved in a pivotal moment in the program and school’s history. SEEK was founded in 1966, as an initiative to bring students from non-traditional paths into Queens College, with a focus on low-income, public high school students and those from marginalized racial backgrounds. In January 1969, students in the SEEK program staged an uprising against the predominantly white administration and faculty of the program, demanding the hiring of more faculty that reflected the SEEK student body population, which, at the time of the uprising consisted of Black American and immigrant as well as Puerto Rican students. [1] SEEK students also wanted more diverse curricular options, their program focused primarily on vocational and professional training that segregated them from their Queens College peers who were receiving a more traditional liberal arts education. [2] The SEEK student protests of 1969 belongs within the legacy student discontent and activism that occurred across the United States, in France, and other places across the world in the previous year, 1968. Andrews’ hiring occurred months before the SEEK Uprising and he even facilitated early discussions with organizers in his studio, according to a note he wrote. [3] In this heady moment, the professional, the political, and the artistic all collided and intermingled in Andrews’s life.  

The SEEK student protests and Andrews’s hiring at Queens College also coincided with the formation of the BECC, which was initially started to address the systematic discrimination against Black fine artists in the mainstream, white-dominated art world of the 1960s. [4]  Andrews understood the mission of the BECC to be a nimble and responsive one, as evidenced by sentiments provided by the artist in a taped interview from 1972 with scholar and filmmaker, James Hatch, a recording of which resides in Andrews’s papers. Andrews explains how the BECC formed as a responsive group, primed to dedicate energy towards pressing issues, starting out with museum demonstrations and improving racial demographics within them to shifting gears following the horrific, state-enacted massacre following an uprising by inmates at Attica State Prison in western New York in September 1971. [5] This shift in focus and tactic took the form of a series of BECC-organized prison art programs, buoyed by support from the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Council, in New York City’s main downtown jail, then colloquially known as the “Tombs.” [6] The BECC went on to support the development of prison art programs beyond New York City, lending their name and funding to bringing creative workshops to incarcerated adults and children in carceral institutions across the United States, from large cities like Chicago and to more isolated, rural penitentiaries. [7] 

Andrews incorporated his work in prisons and jails via the BECC into his SEEK curriculum. In one class, as indicated in a course description, students could expect to work creatively with incarcerated people, devising workshops and projects that the students could bring into carceral institutions [8]. SEEK also exhibited the work of students and inmates for the Queens College community. [9] In a Queens College newspaper, a SEEK counselor expressed satisfaction with the work they had done with incarcerated people through Andrews’s art program in SEEK. [10] While Andrews would also offer more conventional art classes, covering principles of fine art painting and some art history, his work with incarcerated people could not be uncleaved from the initial development of his pedagogical philosophy.  

Andrews’s files on SEEK also reveal that the attempts to mollify students and change the environment at Queens College after the 1969 student protests saw mixed results. Faculty members hired under the auspices of the SEEK reforms faced suspicion and resistance in the departments they were hired into. In a correspondence exchange, Andrews and another instructor, artist and printmaker, Eleanor Magid, received word that their courses were not considered “rigorous” enough by standards set by other faculty in the Queens College Art Department. [11] Others questioned the need for SEEK students to take arts courses in the first place, given the emphasis early on in the program’s inception on vocational training. [12] These interdepartmental scabbles and institutional rows are a microcosm of the broader struggle within institutions of higher education, art, politics, and many other forms to adapt to calls for more representation of the diversity of New York City and the United States in the Cold War era. One solution, as evidenced by Andrews’s innovative prison art-college class curriculum, was to propose new models that collapsed the class and historical structures that the institutions were founded on and—in the process—dissolve the physical boundary of carceral institutions and the intellectual and class boundaries of the ivory tower, replacing them with new pathways for creative freedom of expression.  

 

Footnotes:

[1] Annie Tummino and Rachel Kahn, “Campus Unrest at 50: Commemorating the Legacy of Dissent at Queens College,” The Academic Archivist (blog), June 17, 2019, https://academicarchivist.wordpress.com/2019/06/17/campus-unrest-at-50-commemorating-the-legacy-of-dissent-at-queens-college/. 

[2] “The Voice of Seek” December, 1971, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[3] Letter to Gwyned Simpson, Chairperson for Personnel and Budget for SEEK, from Benny Andrews, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[4] Susan E. Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, (Duke University Press Books, 2016). 

[5] Benny Andrews, Interview by Jim Hatch, 1972 September 30, 10, Box: AV1, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[6] Richard Shepherd, “Drawing Class at Tombs Eases Pent-Up Emotions,” The New York Times, Tuesday, November 16, 1971, newspaper clipping, BECC; unfiled correspondence, 12, Box 139, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.  

[7] Lee Bernstein, “What Works?: Reform and Repression in Prison Programs,” in America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 76–98. 

[8] Curriculum proposal, type-written facsimile, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[9] “First SEEK Art Exhibit,” newspaper clipping, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[10] “College Arts Course Flourishes in Prison,” newspaper clipping, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[11] Letter to Eleanor Magrid from Louis Finkelstein, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder: 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. 

[12] “Operation SEEK,” anonymous letter, Queens College “SEEK”, Box 37, Folder 22, Benny Andrews papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.