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.

Charmian Johnson (Canadian, 1939-2020) was an artist and educator who lived and worked in Vancouver. She studied ceramics under Glenn Lewis, and developed a distinct style within the Leachian tradition having spent a number of years at Bernard Leach’s pottery studio in St. Ives where she catalogued and archived the Leach collection. Beginning in the 1970s, Johnson has been highly regarded across local and international ceramic communities. Throughout her lifetime, she developed a meticulous drawing practice that she kept largely to herself. Rendering botanical elements she encountered in her own garden as well as on her travels to Morocco, Turkey, Hawaii and France, Johnson developed her drawings over time, sometimes for months or even years. Johnson studied drawing, graphics and pottery at the University of British Columbia. She has had solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and UBC Fine Arts Gallery (now the Belkin Gallery). Johnson has been featured in group exhibitions across Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; the Burnaby Art Gallery; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; the Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa; Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver; and in the 2004 exhibition Thrown: Influences and Intentions of West Coast Ceramics at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, which she co-curated.