Joan Bankemper received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Bankemper has shown with Creative Time, Inc., NY; The New Museum, NY; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; and Wave Hill, Riverdale, NY. Bankemper received grants from The George Sugarman Foundation and the NEA. The McColl Center of Visual Arts awarded her the Gabi Award.

Bankemper’s public installations grow out of 20 years of commitment to creating urban gardens with the help of surrounding communities. The artist has worked on projects in New York, Boston, Palermo, Italy and San Antonio, Texas; as well as other cities addressing the relationship of people to nature as reflected in the contemporary urban landscape. Her garden projects are not ordinary or formal gardens; they range from restorative healing herb gardens, to gardens based on the shape of the human body, to planting 600 giant sunflowers, which grow from the ruins of a Southern flour mill. For each of her garden projects, the artist worked within a conceptual framework, each a kind of sculpture in nature as well as political action often blurring the boundaries between art and life.

Out of her ‘social practice’, Bankemper makes ceramic ‘artifacts’. Initially the ceramic urns were produced for the Brent Sikkema Gallery, then Wooster Gardens, in response to the many friends who died of AIDS. Her new ceramic work utilizes high-fired handmade porcelain buttons attached to canvases, incorporating such so-called prosaic skills as sewing while also addressing the issue of how things get held together.

In 2008, Bankemper founded the Black Meadow Barn, a 150-year-old farm located in the Hudson Valley, N.Y. The Barn is a place where ‘horticulture and culture meet’; sustainable farming is both practical and practiced. She continues to cultivate gardens, ceramics and ‘conversations’ at the Black Meadow Barn often including visual artists, farmers and culinary experts.

Bankemper has exhibited environments and aspects of her social practice with Amy Lipton Fine Arts. Her objects have been exhibited with Nancy Hoffman Gallery and are included in numerous private collections. She lives and works in both New York City and Warwick, New York.

Source: Adapted from www.joan-bankemper.com.