Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: renabranstengallery.com
John Bankston was born in 1963 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. He initially pursued pre-medical studies at the University of Chicago, where he earned a BA in Biology in 1985. After taking a studio art class with Chicago artist Vera Clement, he redirected his path toward visual art, relocating to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. He completed his MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990, where he studied with Ray Yoshida and Don Baum, key figures in the Chicago Imagist tradition. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1989. Bankston has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since.
Over the course of his career Bankston has received numerous honors, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2001), the Artadia Award for San Francisco Bay Area artists (2001), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2002), the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), and the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2004). In 2021–22 he served as the Virginia & Benjamin Holt Visiting Artist at Stanford University, where he taught narrative painting and completed a public commission for Meta. His work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and Smith College Museum of Art, among others.
Bankston works primarily in painting and drawing, employing an approach rooted in the visual vocabulary of children’s coloring books — bold outlines, flat fields of color, and simplified figures — to construct fantastical narrative worlds. Beginning in the early 2000s, he developed an ongoing visual saga centered on the character Mr. M, a Black queer protagonist who journeys through a landscape called the Rainbow Forest, accompanied by large cats and other animal companions. The work blends figuration and abstraction, with oil paint applied thickly, thinly, brushed, and poured to emphasize its physical presence alongside the linear coloring-book scaffolding.
Bankston’s paintings explore themes of identity, belonging, desire, masculinity, and acceptance. Recurring motifs include drag, impersonation, and costuming — figures wear animal skins, flamboyant headdresses, and cowboy gear — functioning as metaphors for the construction of self and the negotiation of community. His influences span the Chicago Imagists, Bay Area painters Joan Brown and Viola Frey, Bob Thompson, and the visual culture of the Radical Faeries movement. Recent work has evolved toward more vulnerable compositions using acrylic and oil pastel without the defining outlines of earlier pieces, incorporating responses to pandemic isolation and social upheaval.
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