The artwork above is one of the pieces for which Marilyn was thrown out of the Queens College MFA program in 1969.
“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