by Robert Brokl
This 20-plus-year survey of paintings by John Bankston features prime examples of the cartoony figurative work that’s brought him renown, along with more recent work reflecting shifts in media, mode of expression and personal life.
The artist asserts his identity as black and queer and adds animals (large cats) to the mix, along with humor and nods to the gay subculture. The earliest work on view resembles scaled-up coloring books, while his more recent work evokes a faux-naif world of vulnerability, reflecting the influence of the Chicago Imagists, whom he encountered while earning an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This exhibition is titled Twenty Years in the Rainbow Forest, but his airy woodland of stylized trees and flowers is less Sierra Club than Radical Faeries—the gay movement formed in the late 1970s that played with pansexuality, hippie drag and outdoor celebration. (Burning Man may be a more mainstream and heterosexual adaptation of similar anarchic impulses.)
Bankston’s escapist playland (not meant pejoratively) may be populated with black gay men, but his work overlaps with the same narrative tradition of Bay Area feminist trailblazers like Joan Brown and Viola Frey. As it happens, Bankston worked for a time in Frey’s studio, producing figurative ceramic sculpture. Her expressionistic, antic, simplified depictions — so dissimilar to the photo-realists who were also faculty members of what was then the California College College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) — may be another influence, although Bankston’s world is more fantasy-based.
Joan Brown’s repetitive use of a stylized version of herself as painter, swimmer, lover, and seeker is echoed in Bankston’s use of a male figure, presumably the artist, often solitary and gazing at the viewer. He shares Brown’s use of feathery brushstrokes and her fascination and identification with lions and tigers—in his case, as companions, muses and guardians. As with Brown, Bankston’s humans and animals sometimes blend and merge. Frequently, as seen in the show’s signature work, Same Boat (2007), figures wear animal skins and furs—more benign costuming or camouflage than spoils of big game hunting.
The captain in this painting is a studly Folsom Street leather daddy sporting an eye patch, cap and vest over a bare torso. Interestingly, Bankston leaves one of his hands uncolored inside a black outline, an arty touch reminiscent of Warhol’s silkscreen printing “errors.” The same character takes center stage in Midday Idyll (2009). Provocatively lounging in a flowery meadow, he’s Ferdinand the Bull personified.
Bankston’s palette is bright, his “forest” a refuge, not a spooky, nightmarish entrapment. For the most part, his paint handling is flat, as in a cartoon. One exception is the exuberant gay cowboy send-up Pink Sunset (2004) in which he plays with loaded brush strokes and arbitrary, splashy color, even adding blue swatches to a face.
Thematically, these unlikely cowboys wouldn’t raise eyebrows in a gay setting—there are gay square dancing groups, after all, but the image resonates in contemporary mainstream culture. Annie Proulx’s tragic Brokeback Mountain story appeared in 1997, with the Ang Lee movie version following in 2005. Pedro Almodovar revisited the tale and posited a less fatalistic ending in his recent Strange Way of Life. But Lil Nas X’s music video, Old Town Road, from 2018, aligns most closely with Bankston’s campy spoof.
Bankston has expressed admiration for the doomed, posthumously elevated Black painter Bob Thompson, whose work was influenced by jazz and noted for simplified, flattened figures with political references. The Prince 1 (2014) suggests the heroic Haitian liberator and former slave Touissant Louverture, wearing his signature uniform—a dressy European-style waistcoat with gold buttons and epaulets. Here, he’s more boyish, practicing revolution.
His most recent work reflects the isolation of the pandemic, the George Floyd protests and a milestone birthday (60). The figures, rendered with acrylic and oil pastel – minus the black outlines seen in early works – seem more vulnerable. Unfortunately, one of Bankston’s best works, the 2024 suite of acrylic drawings on Carta Pura paper titled A Walk in the Woods, is not on display because it is unframed. Ask, and the gallerists will gladly show it to you. Like Chinese ink-and-brush paintings, these sepia-toned works, with washes of subtle color, are gems. #6 A Mournful Dance to the Sound of the Lost Horn and #8 Music Makes a Bond are especially fine, signposts of where Bankston may be headed next.
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John Bankston: “Twenty Years in the Rainbow Forest” @ Rena Bransten Gallery through April 20, 2024.
About the author: Robert Brokl is a painter and printmaker with an MFA from UC Berkeley, where he studied with Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Karl Kasten, Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Sylvia Lark. His work is in the public collections of the Library of Congress, Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts (FAMSF), Oakland Museum of California, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, the LGBT Historical Society Museum, SF; and Bates College Museum of Art. He was an artist in residence at the de Young Museum (FAMSF) in 2006, the year he was awarded a Gottlieb Foundation grant.
