When you step into Andrew Harrison’s garage, you don’t expect to meet 25 tilapia circling beneath a canopy of kale. But for Andrew—artist, teacher, long-time friend of Friends education, and joyful tinkerer—art begins exactly here: in the moment something surprises you enough to look twice.

“People walk in and think they’re looking at a sculpture,” he laughs. “And then they notice the fish. The best art makes you tilt your head and go, "What is going on here?”

That instinct for surprise shapes everything Andrew brings to Abington Friends School as an Upper School Photography teacher, from his multidisciplinary studio practice to the way he opens the world of photography to students who arrive confident in their camera-roll expertise, only to discover how much there is still to learn.

A Life in Motion

Andrew has been teaching art for over 25 years, weaving his way through a spectrum of schools and artistic communities. He taught for 15 years at a boarding school in New Jersey, then spent five years in New York at Friends Seminary. “I’m deeply rooted in the Friends school world,” he says. “My wife even teaches at Princeton Friends.”

At AFS, Andrew teaches all sections of Photo I—a course that, in his hands, becomes a space not just for technical learning but for “relearning the thing you think you know.”

“Everyone knows how to make an image,” he says. “They do it every day. But photography is rigorous. You break down something familiar so students can see how powerful an image really is.”

Recently, Andrew’s work has been shaped by his residency at Project 14C in Jersey City, an initiative designed to lift the city’s arts scene out of Manhattan’s shadow. His project began with an encounter with W.E.B. DuBois’s archive of nearly 800 photographs curated for the 1900 Paris Exposition, a deliberate reframing of Black American life for a global audience.

“DuBois understood the power of a photograph at a time when images were rare and expensive,” Andrew explains. “He wanted to use that power to let the world see Black Americans differently.”

Andrew downloaded the entire digitized archive from the Library of Congress and began telling new stories with it. “That’s my raw material,” he says. “Speculative fiction, drawing, painting—it’s all a way of letting the archive keep talking.” The project eventually became part of a show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and it continues to evolve.

Fish, Kale and Community

Some of Andrew’s other exhibits focus less on the historical and more on the living. For example, one of Andrew’s most surprising experiments, a fully-functional aquaponics ecosystem, sprang from a simple question: How do communities sustain themselves?

He scavenged a half-broken ShopRite cart from a Jersey City street, lined it with plastic, rigged up grow lights, and created a closed-loop exhibit where fish nourished plants and plants nourished fish. The system ran for three months in the residency space before growing up and out into his garage at home.

“I use art to research whatever I’m curious about,” he says. “I had no idea how to raise fish or grow kale. That was the point. You don’t walk into something like that fully knowing what’s going to happen. It’s alive. It’s in motion. It’s the same thing with photography. A photo shouldn’t hit you over the head. It should leave you curious—pull you in.”

Students enter Photo I expecting a technical class about composition and lighting, and that’s certainly part of it. But those same students leave having experienced a course that challenges their assumptions about representation, identity, movement, and space. Andrew encourages students to create images that raise questions rather than answer them outright. He doesn’t claim the mantle of expert photographer (”I don’t have all the baggage,” he jokes), but he brings something perhaps more complete: the freedom to rethink what a photograph can be, how it’s made, and why it matters.

“I’m interested in how people move through space,” he says. “Who gets to be where? What transforms when we move? That shows up in everything I do.”

Surprise, curiosity, motion, reinvention. In Andrew’s classroom (as in his garage!), the art is alive, shifting, pushing us to look twice. And before you ask, yes, that means fish can be art.

"Through archives, maps, and embodied movement, Harrison explores altered geographies—dwelling between rupture and repair—and argues for memory, myth, and imagination as essential tools for reshaping the world." - Jordan Horton, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey