Trailblazing B.C. artist Anna Banana remembered for energized, subversive legacy
Mail art and performance-art pioneer’s works will live on at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery collection at UBC
Anna Banana’s Columbus Day Parade entry, San Francisco, 1974. Photographer unknown. From the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria retrospective.
Mail artist Anna Banana at the Ex Postal Facto conference in San Francisco, February 2014. Photo by Parker Higgins
Anna Banana, Cavellini is Stuck on Anna Banana, 1977, mail art project. Photograph by Rick Soloway. From the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria retrospective.
B.C.’S VISUAL ART SCENE has lost a pioneering force in conceptual, mail, and performance art—all spiked with humour.
Anna Banana died November 29 on the Sunshine Coast, and is being remembered this week by galleries and artists for her subversive playfulness, expressed through multiple, energized forms.
“We are slowly losing significant members of a generation of artists who were bold and determined in their resistance to the status quo,” Daina Augaitis, chief curator emerita at the Vancouver Art Gallery, wrote in a post. “In Anna Banana’s case, she paired politics with a strong sense of humour throughout her creative endeavours.”
“Anna Banana’s playful resistance to the social status quo throughout her long artistic career will be deeply missed,” the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery shared in a post this week. “We share our best thoughts and wishes with her family and friends.” Anna Banana’s archives reside at the gallery at UBC, where she once studied.
Born in 1940 in Victoria as Anne Lee Long, she acquired her better-known name from students at Vancouver’s New School in 1968—and then famously started using the moniker herself after falling into a box of bananas at a party in 1970. She pursued a legal name change in 1985—and through the years acquired a famously huge archive of banana paraphernalia.
Banana became a key part of the Mail Art network in 1971 through her “Banana Rag” newsletter, which she began publishing in conjunction with her “Town Fool” project in Victoria (in which she took on a costumed persona around town). She began corresponding with Ray Johnson, General Idea, and the international postal art network that eventually developed. Banana’s role in that mail-art scene of the 1960s to the 1980s was recently acknowledged at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s huge Copy Machine Manifesto. Her projects also included the creation of artistamps, postage-stamp-sized pieces of art.
In 1973 she moved to San Francisco, collaborated on performances with the Bay Area Dadaists, began publishing VILE magazine (a combination of art, poetry, fiction, letters, photos, and manipulated ads from Life magazine) in 1974, and in 1975 produced her first Banana Olympics—a satirically silly parody of the Olympic games that she again held in 1980, this time at Bear Creek Oval Athletic Field, organized by the Surrey Art Gallery.
Infused with the same clownish humour, her pioneering public events, essentially acts of performance art, subverted authority and engaged audiences in creative acts.
In 1974, Banana also participated in Glenn Lewis and Gerry Gilbert’s The First B.C. Art Race, in which artists ran along Georgia Street carrying their art on their backs; Anna Banana won first prize on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Her influence spanned across the globe, “research projects” including “Tie a Knot on Me”—an interactive work presented in 1993 as part of Berlin’s annual Transportale event in 22 subway stations across the German city. In it she engaged passersby in tying a knot with coloured threads on the back of her jacket, gathering the public’s response to the unusual request. Her “But is it Art? Where do you draw the line?”, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to define art, was presented in Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Bremen, and beyond in 2009.
She was the subject of a big retrospective at Open Space and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2016, accompanied by a book edited by AGGV chief curator Michelle Jacques, Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana. “While Anna Banana is a name that is widely recognized and admired in the counter-cultural community, it is time for her to be better known in the mainstream art world,” the book’s intro by AGGV director Jon Tupper reads.
Banana's "bountiful legacy" is perhaps best captured in a later essay by Helen Marzolf in the same Figure 1 Publishing publication: "zany, parodic, renegade, unrelentingly political and irresistable to participants". 
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