Anna Banana (Canadian, b. Anne Lee Frankham, 1940-2024) was a distinctive voice in the fields of conceptual, performance and mail art, playfully resist the status quo through her artistic practice. She has been described as a conceptualist rather than an image maker, with her artistic activities spiralling out and giving rise to new projects, utilizing whatever media the concept required. As a performance artist, Anna Banana created interactive events as a way of engaging audiences to become active participants. She was active in the international mail art network since 1971, adopting her pseudonym this same year and providing materials and ideas for other work and an ongoing connection to an international community of artists who are, like her, more interested in creating and exchanging ideas and small artworks than they are in producing art for a market. From the 1960s, Anna Banana met and collaborated with numerous Vancouver-based mail artists, including Ken Friedman, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, Gary Lee-Nova, Dana Atchley, Eric Metcalfe, Kate Craig and Glenn Lewis, sending out her Banana Rag newsletter. 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. Anna Banana returned to Vancouver in 1981 where she continued her practice as a performance artist, spending her final years on the Sunshine Coast, BC. 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.

Diamond Point is a contemporary Coast Salish artist and a member of the Musqueam Indian Band. Point grew up on Reserve, and currently resides in Ladner with her daughter and husband. As an emerging artist, Point feels her artwork is current and belongs within the present, and she continues to develop and change her techniques and style throughout her experiences. In her work, Point respectfully incorporates traditional Coast Salish design elements to represent the beautiful teachings and history that her ancestors have passed down through generations since time immemorial.

In 2014, Point work was included in Claiming Space: Voices of Urban Indigenous Youth at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. In 2018, Diamond created designs for the UBC Totem Park residences that were named after the traditional Musqueam village sites c̓əsnaʔəm, həm̓ləsəm̓ and q̓ələχən. In 2019, Point’s artwork became the logo for the Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) conference at UBC, on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Point’s work was also showcased at the Richmond Brighouse Canada Line Station, as part of the 2019 Capture Photography Festival.

Point currently studies at UBC in the NITEP Indigenous Teacher Education Program in the Faculty of Education. Point aims to work as a secondary social studies and art teacher, and feels fortunate to have had the opportunities to express her Indigenous identity and culture within many realms.