Menu
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Search Results

← All news

28 Jan 2025

Newly Digitized Bananas in Distress by Anna Banana

  • Anna Banana

    Anna Banana (Canadian, 1940-2024) was a conceptual performance and mail artist. Born in Victoria as Anne Lee Long, the artist adopted the name Anna Banana in 1971 when she began corresponding with the International Mail Art Network (including Image Bank’s artist lists). Between 1973 and 1981, Banana lived in San Francisco where she collaborated with Bill Gaglione of Dadaland and the Bay Area Dadaists, and began publishing VILE magazine, a counterpart to General Idea’s FILE Megazine, itself a parody of LIFE magazine. Banana’s performance works include Futurist Sound, Proof Positive Germany is Going Bananas, Banan Communion, But, is it Art? and the interactive public performance, the Banana Olympics. In 2021, Anna Banana donated her artwork and paper archive to the Belkin and UBC Rare Books and Special Collections respectively; the Belkin’s holdings include exchanges with artists in the International Mail Art Network, issues of VILE magazine, costumes from the artist’s performances and a selection of her Artistamp editions, among other items.

    Read More

As we remember BC artist Anna Banana (1940-2024), who was a pioneer in the mail art movement from 1971, we are pleased to share her 1998 work Bananas in Distress. Typical of her interdisciplinary practice that spanned interactive performance, archives as artistic practice, publication and correspondence art, Bananas in Distress sees Anna Banana taking to the streets in a parodic scientific study to determine the effects of bananas in public opinion.

This work is now publicly accessible thanks to the generous support of the BC History Digitization Program at UBC, alongside 95 other works of film, video and sound recordings previously held only on obsolete media. This project also included the digitization of works by Helen Goodwin, Geoffrey Hendricks, bpNichol, bill bissett and many others.

We would also like to extend our gratitude to Bahar Vaghari-Moghaddam, Collections Assistant, for arranging and describing the Anna Banana collection, and to Vanessa Lee, Archives Assistant, for making these works accessible on our CollectiveAccess database.

Watch Bananas in Distress by Anna Banana

 

Images: Anna Banana, Bananas in Distress, Research Project No. 2 (stills), 1998 (48.1.38). Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Anna Banana collection

 

  • Anna Banana

    Anna Banana (Canadian, 1940-2024) was a conceptual performance and mail artist. Born in Victoria as Anne Lee Long, the artist adopted the name Anna Banana in 1971 when she began corresponding with the International Mail Art Network (including Image Bank’s artist lists). Between 1973 and 1981, Banana lived in San Francisco where she collaborated with Bill Gaglione of Dadaland and the Bay Area Dadaists, and began publishing VILE magazine, a counterpart to General Idea’s FILE Megazine, itself a parody of LIFE magazine. Banana’s performance works include Futurist Sound, Proof Positive Germany is Going Bananas, Banan Communion, But, is it Art? and the interactive public performance, the Banana Olympics. In 2021, Anna Banana donated her artwork and paper archive to the Belkin and UBC Rare Books and Special Collections respectively; the Belkin’s holdings include exchanges with artists in the International Mail Art Network, issues of VILE magazine, costumes from the artist’s performances and a selection of her Artistamp editions, among other items.

    Read More

Related