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Indepth Arts News:
"John Bankston: Temptation and Desire"
2002-03-21 until 2002-04-28
Atlanta College o f Art
Atlanta, GA,
USA United States of America
Temptation and Desire presents a selection of John Bankston’s paintings and drawings, companion pieces full of playful magic and narrative surprise. Pervaded by a generosity of spirit and infused with a stylistic wistfulness, the images engage mature issues of race and sexual identity by way of childhood experience.
Bankston appropriates the familiar stylistic language of coloring books to innovative ends: in his hands coloring becomes a metaphor for identity and filling in the lines carries weight as a cultural act. Drawing on a variety of sources -- 19th-century slave narratives, Igbo masquerade, science fiction, contemporary gay culture -- Bankston manipulates the conventions of fairy-tales to create surprising characters set in fantasies of transformation and identity.
John Bankston earned a BA in Biology from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has since had solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. In 2001, Bankston's work was featured in the Freestyle exhibition curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and he received the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award. John Bankston lives and works in San Francisco.
Atlanta College of Art Gallery presents John Bankston: Temptation and Desire,
the premier exhibition of the artist's work in the Southeast, in cooperation with the Woodruff Arts Center and American Express, as part of the continuing program Celebrate Diversity Through the Arts.
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