Marilyn Banner

Marilyn Banner was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a BFA in Painting from Washington University and pursued further work in the fine arts at Queens College (CUNY), University of Maryland, and Massachusetts College of Art (MSEd 1982). Mentors David Lund, Lowry Burgess, Marvin Bileck, and Betsy Damon were significant influences in her approach to painting, media, concept, and content. Banner has been awarded ten fellowship residencies to Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has received grants from Montgomery County Arts Council and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has exhibited extensively in the US, including at the Ratner Museum, Corcoran Museum, and B’nai B’rith Museum (all DC area), and at Ceres Gallery and Hebrew Union College Museum in NYC. She has been a member of Ceres Gallery (New York City) since 1992 and a participant in The Yellow Chair Salon. She lives with her musician husband Carl Banner in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Marilyn Banner’s work has ranged broadly in material and subject matter. Her interest in Jung, psychology, spirituality, and feminism inspired two decades of work based on dream imagery, meditation, and personal history. From 1980 to 1999 her forms ranged from large scale drawing and oil painting, to sculpture, assemblage, installation, collage, and painting, using visceral and physical media such as bones, wood, latex, hair, wax, and soil, to more ethereal media such as layered imagery on chiffon, fabric, lace, and metallic threads. Following a visit to Terezin, a concentration camp near Prague, she created work that looked at the history of anti-Semitism and Jewish ancestry. From 2004 to 2021 Banner worked exclusively with encaustic paint on wood, her subject matter primarily derived from the natural world, its tactility and substance. In 2021 she began to revisit her earlier approach to material and subject matter, combining drawing, painting, and mixed media in intimately scaled works.