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.

Michael Morris (1942-2022) was a painter, photographer, video and performance artist and curator. His work is often media based and collaborative, involved with developing networks and in the production and presentation of new art activity. In his roles as curator and, primarily, as an artist, Morris was a key figure of the West Coast art scene during the 1960s. Morris studied at the University of Victoria and then at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), followed by graduate studies at Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London, during the 1960s. There he became interested in the work of Fluxus and the European avant-garde, which had a profound influence on his work and on the Vancouver experimental art scene in general. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Vincent Trasov, a system of postal correspondence between participating artists for the exchange of information and ideas. The intention of Image Bank was to create a collaborative, process-based project in the hopes of engendering a shared creative consciousness—in opposition to the alienation endemic to modern capitalist society—through the deconstruction and recombination of its ideological forms. Morris was acting curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University and has had many guest curatorships at other institutions. In 1973, he co-founded the Western Front—one of Canada’s first artist-run centres—and served as co-director for seven years. In 1990 he and Trasov founded the Morris/Trasov Archive, housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art. He has established a strong international reputation and worked for many years in Berlin. Morris has participated in artist-in-residence programs both in Canada at the Banff Centre (1990) and at Open Studio (2003) and internationally at Berlin Kustlerprogramm (1981-1998). Morris has had numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts, the 2011 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and an Honorary Doctorate in 2005 by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.