Marilyn art shirts (via Vistaprint). We have sold a few, but we mostly wear them ourselves and give them as gifts.
Some of our shirts.
The Wellfleet Public Library
The Wellfleet Public Library is much more than a collection of books, although the books there are truly wonderful. It is a central cultural institution of the town of Wellfleet and other parts of the Cape. It hosts concerts, lectures, art exhibits, and more, and has the happiest children’s book room you have ever seen. There is a conference room with 60 chairs, a P.A., and a first rate Steinway B piano.
I have played over a dozen concerts there over the last 20 years, and Marilyn had a major exhibition there a couple of years ago. Remnants of the exhibit still remain: little quotations that were taped to occasional bookshelves, and one or two book cubicles that have been turned over to works that she left with the librarian.
Some of Marilyn’s sculptures, a painting, and one of the quotations that remain on the shelves, two years later.
But the real treasure of the Library is Naomi Czekaj-Robbins, Assistant Library Director. She has enthusiastically and gracefully enabled everything we have done.
I am very excited to be playing another program in the Library on September 26: piano music of Brahms, Schubert, and Beethoven.
Michael David
Marilyn has been involved with artist Michael David as mentor, advisor, sponsor, and gallerist, initially through his “Yellow Chair Salon”, and then through individual consultation and critiques, and recently through his sponsorship of her at the Outsider Art Fair and a show at his gallery, M. David & Co. at ArtCake in Brooklyn.
We paid him a visit at his home in Tivoli, as he was preparing a major exhibition of his new work, composed largely of broken mirrors. His bio is pretty extraordinary, including a period as bass guitar for the Plasmatics. An unusually generous soul (especially for a male artist).
Michael David, in his studio at Tivoli.
Marilyn, reflected in one of Michael’s mirror pieces.
Marilyn and NY artist friends
Marilyn had ~100 pieces up at M. David & Co. at ArtCake in Brooklyn. We were thrilled to see our two great artist friends there: Betsy Damon and Sue Collier.
Marilyn with friend and mentor Betsy Damon, at M. David & Co. at ArtCake in Brooklyn.
Betsy Damon, Marilyn, and Sue Collier at M. David & Co. at ArtCake in Brooklyn
Marilyn with Schroeder Cherry and the piece she purchased at Artists and Makers
Buying Shroeder Cherry's Art
Marilyn and I bought this piece from Schroeder Cherry at his show at Artists and Makers. He found it hilarious that I thought my phone was out of focus because I had not put on my glasses.
Duke Fightmaster in “Ghosting”
Ghosting
[Click on the picture to see the “Ghosting” short by Duke Fightmaster]
I find that I get very upset when musicians do not reply to my emails or phone calls. I call it “the Washington diss”, a variety of snub. In NY, in my limited experience, they do it differently: they want you to particularly understand how unimportant you are, or how much they hate you. But my experience is largely Washington, and this is how they do it here - they simply ignore or “ghost” you, and that is supposed to be understood on all sides. It’s not that they didn’t get the communication - it’s that silence is their answer.
DC diss: "Who you?"
NY diss: "Die, scum!"
I wrote about it in my 2013 journal, and it came out like a kafkaesque poem about communication:
“People coming to doors, windows; people knocking, ringing, phoning, texting. Telegrams, email, letter, fedex, messenger, skywriting, rumor, signs, signals. Flags, color changes. Futile waiting, standing up, misunderstanding, snubbing, rejecting, ghosting. Truancy, dilatory; apologies, no apologies; excuses, no excuses. Acknowledgment, no acknowledgment. Standing at the door shivering. At some other place, some other door. In the hospital, kidnapped. Forgot. Misplaced contact info, decided against, went away. Deliberately offensive. No excuses. Wrong day, wrong way. Thought better of it.”
(Indeed, I have been left out in the rain, shivering, for half an hour, while a church music director could not decide whether to give me a key to get into the church to play a concert).
“A musician declines an engagement, saying to me, "I have decided that I will only play concerts that will further my career." Well, this explains everything! My solitude and isolation, the unreturned phone calls and emails, the musicians who pretend they don't recognize me in a restaurant or on the metro.”
"Jamie Raskin Oratorio" now on Vimeo
"The Jamie Raskin Oratorio" — World premiere, September 7, 2024 - A Washington Musica Viva Commission — featuring poetry by Anne Becker, adapted from United States Representative Jamie Raskin’s memoir, “UNTHINKABLE”, with original music by Noam Faingold. Performed by Anne Becker, poet, Chris Royal, trumpet, and Carl Banner, piano. Video courtesy of Church of the Ascension, Bailey Joy Myers, director of music.
(Uploaded to Vimeo, so without any ear-blasting irrelevant ads!)
Large paintings on foamcore
When we closed the Hyattsville storage unit last year, seven large paintings on foamcore from 1989 came home with us, too big to fit in our house, so we leaned them against the back wall of the carport, where they have been weathering for several months. Two of them we destroyed, and we will ultimately lose the others as well, but we decided to do a little video documentation before they disappear. (Yes, there were a few mosquitoes).
Music on the Cape
Mar saw a notice on a bulletin board for a happy hour gig with Chandler Travis, she googled, and we went to hear him. He plays at Caroline’s Restaurant in Eastham, acoustic, barefoot (multicolored toenails) and in shorts, with a beat-up old guitar. He has a regular circus of collaborators he calls the Chandler Travis Philharmonic.
We were very fortunate to get together with Ed and his twin granddaughters to read through Brahms Quartet in A Op. 26. The young ladies were reading it for the first time - they had never even heard the piece before!
Marilyn on the beach
Living with an Artist
We just got back from a fabulous two weeks on Cape Cod. Marilyn set herself up a small studio on a table, and brought in a variety of precious objects from the beach - some rusty metal, the complete head of a striped bass, picked clean by gulls, encrusted shells, monstrous sticks, seaweed, many tiny crab shells and crab claws. She drew them on torn pieces of canvas. When it was time to pack up to leave, she meticulously packed up her pens and canvas and these very delicate pieces of nature, including the fish head, baby crabs, delicate seaweed, and some smelly snail shells, wrapping each item separately and placing them in plastic containers. It took hours.
Arriving at BWI yesterday evening, we discovered that, although all the art items arrived safely, she had forgotten to pack our money, the car key, and a few other important items. We will try to get a replacement key tomorrow and go pick up the car.
Marilyn is very proud to have 31 drawings at the Farm Projects Print Room in Wellfleet.
Chopin and Flowers
Bonnie Thron and I played the great Chopin cello Sonata in Raleigh NC. Here is a clip.
(click on flower for video)
Sublime Beethoven and Natural Beauty
One of our most popular Instagram videos. With Bonnie Thron, cello.
(Click on image to view)
Another former IG post that people seemed to enjoy.
Henriette Bosmans Sonata clip, Bonnie Thron, cello; Marilyn Banner art plus Cape Cod nature photos
Some Biographical Material
Mike Hummel wrote his 2007 American Studies doctoral thesis “Three American Artists at Midlife: Negotiating the Space Between Amateur and Professional Status”, using me as one of the “informants”. He interviewed me multiple times over 5 years and used transcripts of our conversations in his thesis. I find it really interesting to reflect back on what I had to say and how he interpreted it in the context of his research. These interviews lay out the trajectory of my professional life as a musician, whereas the recent memoir addresses almost exclusively my inner life. Here is the full document (by permission from Dr. Hummel).
Carl Banner, 1998
How I Overcame Stage Fright (somewhat ironic!)
I was an informant for Mike Hummel’s 2007 PhD thesis. This is an extract:
“As noted earlier, Carl was fiercely independent in his thinking about music, and because he had been living outside the musical “box” for so long, he had not had to accept limitations in terms of style and canon that others did to survive. Carl wanted back in, but on his own terms. He had his own ideas about music, forged initially during a decade of intense training in his youth, then slowly modified by influences and experiences both inside and outside the established classical musical world. A concert in Buffalo in his early twenties had been a pivotal experience:
MH: In terms of your musical education, when was the biggest part of your crisis? In your 20s? When did you become aware of the crisis?
CB: Well, I’ll tell you, the one critical memory. It was a series of events, really, but it was in Buffalo in late 1969 or early 1970. I was 21. I was performing in a fairly legitimate venue with a violinist from the Buffalo Symphony and he was a strait-laced Viennese. And we were playing some wonderful music but he played it absolutely cold. No emotion at all. And so, I was very…increasingly upset about it. And um, in those days, I was doing a lot of drugs and took mescaline, and uh…I thought for some reason I thought that I would take mescaline before the concert. And so, I got out there on the stage just as the drug was taking effect, and I felt like I’m playing something which is supposed to be music with this idiot, and the audience looked hostile to me, and I thought, ‘I don’t think so,’ and so I played one movement of the first piece and then I walked off the stage and told the people that I wasn’t feeling well and was going home. My friend, another musician, was backstage, was quite alarmed, and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just take off your coat, because it’s hot.’ I was wearing a suit or a tux, I guess. So I went back out…he convinced me to go back out on the stage. By this time, I’m ‘tripping.’ So I said to myself ‘what do I have to lose, I’m gonna be absolutely there.’ So I played without…the concert completely full throttle out. The consequence was that I played real music, the violinist was completely beside the point, and the reviewer in the newspaper the next day commented on the contrast between the violinist’s “lack of depth of feeling” vs. the pianist’s “more impassioned playing, sometimes overpowering him.”
MH: Did you play with your Viennese “idiot” again?
CB: No, no. Fortunately, I never spoke with him again. But I learned something there that I really took to heart, which was that you could be way way out there and play music. Now for years after that I played most of my concerts stoned and it was only gradually that I realized that I had changed enough that I could risk going out on the stage straight.
MH: You could still get to the same place.
CB: Still get to the same place. It took awhile to convince myself that that would be the case, but it was like the crutch I didn’t need anymore. You know, I don’t tell this story to everybody. It’s not something I recommend. I don’t think that’s how you do it. It’s what helped me. It certainly calls into question artificial structures that you might have put together, and if those are in your way, you know, it gives you a handle on dismantling them.”
Migrant Worker Woman in the Fields - canvas, brown paper, sawdust, paint on canvas; Marilyn Banner, 1969
Marilyn's Education
The artwork above is one of the pieces for which Marilyn was thrown out of the Queens College MFA program in 1969.
She wrote the following in 2006:
“In 1969 I was kicked out of Queens College Graduate School by a group of sexist men who told me, “You are using mixed media. We do not think you are a serious artist. You need to go have babies and teach grade school!” I was just beginning to do work that came from my experience of being female – sewing canvas onto canvas with curves and folds, adding sand… - very different from my western European male education. I had been taught to see like Cezanne. It never stuck – I didn’t want to see that way.
1969 was pre feminism and pre mixed media (except for some well known male artists like Rauschenberg and Cornell). I left Queens College, as I had no ego at the time with which to fight them. Two other women were in the graduate program – one who’d been an undergrad there (they loved her) and one who fought them and stayed.
The big reward that year was given to a modest fellow who painted small still life paintings daily, over and over, from 9 – 5.
Needless to say I did not give up – though I did have a child and I did teach kids.
I painted sexual looking flower middles and eventually returned to grad school to get to the bottom of the issue – was I really an artist, and if so, how could I express what I had to say.
Getting to the bottom of things meant going into all parts of my psyche and using very unconventional (at the time) materials – real meat, bones, hair, etc. I continued exploring these areas into the 90’s, using latex, steel, sand, more bones, then chiffon, ribbons, cheesecloth, handmade paper, lots of transferred photographs. “
Installation shot from her 1982 thesis show at Mass College of Art
“My work has been idea based for as long as I remember. I don’t usually try to “push the medium” but focus fully on expressing my idea.
Some inspiring concepts have been “Skin”, ”Ladders coming up from the underworld,” “Light,” and personal history. Travel has inspired major work on anti-Semitism and nature. Working with paper and text has allowed me a painterly approach to collage, and the ability to incorporate meaningful imagery and text into the work.
Recently I have begun painting again. (Painting was my major when I was forced to leave school). I have found a medium, encaustic, which allows me to approach the work in a tactile way, to add collage elements, transfer photographs, to use my mixed media approach as well as to draw on my early background in drawing and painting. I have been using encaustic for 3 years and expect to continue with this medium for some time.”
Marilyn Banner, ca. 2006
Update: Marilyn was recently offered a retrospective exhibition at Queens College. She is deciding whether to take them up on it, and if so what to show. One possible show title: “In Spite of it All”.
More Instagram Clips
I no longer use Instagram and have deleted the app. It’s a long sad story. Fortunately, I still have a lot of the clips, and I will begin to post them here.
(Click on image for clip)
More Instagram Clips
Brahms Quartet clip
Instagram threw me off a few years ago, but I still have some of the clips. Here is one from 2021.
Planning for the Outsider Art Fair
Marilyn sent a series of videos of her work to Michael David, gallery director of M. David & Co., in preparation for the 2025 Outsider Art Fair in NYC.
(Semi) Public Art in Takoma Park
We share a fence with our neighbors facing Palmer Lane, and they kindly gave us permission to mount some art on it.