Anna Banana (born February 24, 1940 as Anne Lee Long in Victoria, British Columbia) is a Canadian artist known for her performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "entrepreneur and critic", and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement's early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996.
Banana lives in British Columbia and operates Banana Productions, calling herself the "Top Banana". The International Art Post is the sole publication of Banana Productions, with 700 copies produced for each edition.
Career
Banana attended the University of British Columbia from 1958 to 1963, graduating with an elementary academic teaching certificate. She taught for five years: two in public schools and three in Vancouver's New School.
She began her career in Victoria as a fabric artist, where dissatisfaction with the marketing of her work led toward more-public expressions. In 1971, she declared herself the Town Fool of Victoria and organized a series of interactive events, eventually creating a newsletter, the Banana Rag, to reach a broader audience. She sent a copy to Vancouver artist Gary Lee Nova, who replied with an image-bank request list providing names, addresses and image requests of contemporary mail artists. This began a forty-year relationship with a worldwide, egalitarian art-communication network.
Like many mail artists, she embraced an alter ego, Anna Banana, which eventually became her legal name which she incorporated into correspondence with Ray Johnson, General Idea and the network.
In 1973 Banana moved to San Francisco to join mail-art friends known as the Bay Area Dadaists, who produced Neo-Dadaist performances, mail art and publications. She worked as a typesetter at a print shop, where the first issue of her magazine Vile magazine was printed in 1974. The shop—Speedprint—was a place she told writer Gretchen Wagner, "where it became apparent to me that anyone could be a publisher". Originally envisioned as a place to document and acknowledge network activity, Vile was a combination of art, poetry, fiction, letters, photos and manipulated advertisements from Life magazine. It was predominantly a visual publication, examining the flood of images emerging from mass communication. It was also a response to File magazine's shift towards mainstream art coverage. Gwen Allen wrote, "FILE would continue to publish the Image Bank image request lists until its Fall 1975 issue, but it would gradually distance itself from the mail art scene, prompting a string of takeoffs, including VILE—started, according to editor Anna Banana, in response to FILE'''s growing disdain for mail art'—and later, BILE and SMILE." Between 1974 and 1981, Banana published seven issues of VILE; editions four, six and seven were edited by her partner, Bill Gaglione. During its run, Vile explored a wide range of formats and media defining the mail-art genre. Banana cited as influences Dada humor, therapeutic madness and the Bohemianism of the Bay Area during the 1960s and early 1970s. Viles nihilism fit the punk attitude on the rise in Britain and the United States at the time.
After returning to Canada in 1981, Banana published About Vile, a history of the magazine with a mail-art backlog and an account of a 1978 European tour by her and Gaglione (a documented conclusion of the pair's working relationship). That year Banana also organized a "Banana Art" event for the Global Television Network, held at Bridges Restaurant on Granville Island, Vancouver.
From 1983 to 1985, Banana worked in the production department of Intermedia Press, where she learned full-color printing (a skill used in her 1988 publication, International Art Post). IAP featured dry-gummed, pin-hole perforated sheets consisting of full-color stamps designed by artists. The works were financed cooperatively, with participating artists receiving 500 copies of their stamp and Banana Productions retaining the remainder for sales and promotion. IAP has become an annual publication; the 24th edition was released in October 2011.