Anna Banana at the Ex Postal Facto conference in San Francisco, February 2014 (photo by Parker Higgins)
Canadian mail artist and performance artist Anna Banana has died.
Born Anne Lee Long in Victoria, B.C., she was renowned for her mail art, writing and publishing. She helped to pioneer the artistamp and her archive of mail art papers is now at the University of British Columbia's Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Although she worked as a teacher for five years in the 1960s, she became a full-time artist in the 1970s. She moved to San Francisco in 1971, joining mail art friends who were known as the Bay Area Dadaists. In 1981, she returned to Vancouver, where she became renowned for her performance art. Throughout her life, she showed her work around the world, including presentations across Europe: Rome, Italy; Berlin and Bremen, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Copenhagen and Aarlborg, Denmark and beyond. Her work is found in public and private collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“I’ve really loved what I’ve been,” she told then-editor Portia Priegert for Galleries West in 2015. “It’s fun and it’s thumbing my nose at the straight world.”
Her work was captured in a retrospective titled Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, which Figure 1 co-published with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2015, according to a statement from Figure 1 Publishing.
“We are so sad to hear that Anna has passed away. It was so much fun to work with her on her book,” says Chris Labonté, publisher and president of Figure 1 Publishing. “She was big-hearted and generous and remarkable in every way, and we will miss her.”
Source: Figure 1 Publishing, Wikipedia, Galleries West
