Benny AndrewsFighting for Justice

Excerpt from An Interview with Benny Andrews, 2003. Video by Stanley J. Staniski. Courtesy Stanley J. Staniski/Staniski Media.

The civil rights movement reached the American art world in the late 1960s with the first public demonstrations to integrate museums, demanding representation in exhibitions, acquisitions, and curatorial roles. Artist and curator Howardena Pindell described the art world’s “nepotistic, interlocking system” that restricted access to Black artists and art workers industry wide.1 Until 1967, only a dozen museum exhibitions had featured the work of Black artists with the exception of exhibitions at historically black colleges and universities.2 Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 blockbuster, was no exception; instead of artwork, it displayed mural-sized documentary photographs of street life in Harlem. In response, Benny Andrews cofounded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the museum holding signs asking “Harlem on Whose Mind?”3 The group later protested the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, building coalitions with other organizations to denounce discriminatory hiring and exhibition practices at museums. Such calls rang out across the nation. In 1976 the Santa Clara County Black Caucus, an organization of local citizens, proposed a major exhibition at the San José Museum of Art. Curated by artist Marie Johnson Calloway, the exhibition 20th-Century Black Artists featured twenty nationally and internationally recognized Black artists, including Andrews.4

  1. Susan E. Cahan, introduction to Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. ↩︎

  2. Susan E. Cahan, introduction to Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. ↩︎

  3. Holland Cotter, “What I Learned from a Disgraced Art Show on Harlem,” The New York Times, August 19, 2015. ↩︎

  4. Marie Johnson, 20th Century Black Artists (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 1976). ↩︎