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.

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.