BIO
Marilyn Banner was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University and pursued further work in the fine arts at Queens College (CUNY), University of Maryland, and Massachusetts College of Art (MSEd 1982). Mentors David Lund, Lowry Burgess, Marvin Bileck, and Betsy Damon were significant influences in her approach to painting, media, concept, and content. Banner has been awarded ten fellowship residencies to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has received grants from Montgomery County Arts Council and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has exhibited extensively in the US, including at the Ratner Museum, Corcoran Museum, and B’nai B’rith Museum (all DC area), and at Ceres Gallery and Hebrew Union College Museum in NYC. She has been a member of Ceres Gallery (New York City) since 1992 and lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Marilyn Banner’s work has ranged broadly in material and subject matter. Her interest in Jung, psychology, spirituality, and feminism inspired two decades of work based on dream imagery, meditation, and personal history. From 1980 to 1999 her forms ranged from large scale drawing and oil painting, to sculpture, assemblage, installation, collage, and painting, using visceral and physical media such as bones, wood, latex, hair, wax, and soil, to more ethereal media such as layered imagery on chiffon, fabric, lace, and metallic threads. Following a visit to Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague, she created work that looked at the history of anti-Semitism and Jewish ancestry. From 2004 to 2021 Banner worked exclusively with encaustic paint on wood, her subject matter primarily derived from the natural world, its tactility and substance. In 2021 she began to revisit her earlier approach to material and subject matter, combining drawing, painting, and mixed media in intimately scaled works.
Artist Statement
I work with trust in an inner knowing, a body/psyche sense of the connections of things, inside and out, past and present, lost and found.
I make drawings, paintings, collages, assemblage, installations, and sculpture. I have, and have always had, a need to share what is deep and true for me, to reach into the realm of the poetic. I am compelled to bring the inside of me out into form.
The work here ranges over several decades. Some themes and approaches recur, suggesting darkness and danger, bones, and blood, nature in her flow, profusion, tactility, and presence. Ancestors come and go through my work, often infused with a sense of the spirit, translucent, delicate, light, almost magical.
I respond and work with the visceral nature of my own body, our bodies, of life itself. My work is tactile. I like to hold things that I pick up, to touch things, to carve and poke and smooth and shape things, to leave a sense of my hand. A human being made this.
My work takes me to places and images I sense but have not experienced, to history, personal, ancestral, and collective. To forgotten times. Everything is connected.
Curriculum vitae
Click here for Marilyn’s CV.
Media
Videos of Marilyn’s work on YouTube
available works
MY WORK ON ARTWORK ARCHIVE
Click here to purchase works.
archived works
Looking for the old web site?
Deeper archives of old work can be found in my previous web site,
