Alisa Banks traces her heritage in Colorado Springs exhibit | Arts & Entertainment
The stories of her family and Louisiana Creole ancestors are a lifelong source of fascination for artist Alisa Banks.
She remembers being a little girl, sitting quietly on the floor between her mother’s knees as her mom did her hair and told family stories, sometimes with the help of her aunt and grandmother. That memory inspired a piece in her new exhibit, “Alisa Banks: Unerased,” which opens Friday with a free reception during First Friday at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. It runs through Sept. 6.
“Black women pass on family histories, despite broadly having been denied access to reading and writing,” said Banks from home in Dallas. “The act of hair culture, caring for hair, allowed one to pass on history. That’s something that’s common throughout the many diasporas. My experience is with the African diaspora.”
For the piece, she created a portable writing desk out of a box with a slanted interior. Inside is an inkwell, which is actually hair pomade and a brush made from her hair, and a little book with a cover made of synthetic hair. Its pages feature imagery made from paint or ink that includes soil from her ancestors’ farm in Louisiana.
“That’s a way to incorporate an everyday tradition with culture, with place,” she said, “and address the fact that even though we don’t have written history that doesn’t mean you have no history.”
Her new show is meant to honor and give a voice to her ancestors, to fight against the erasure of Black American history, and to share stories with those who might find some common ground.
“Because they were part of the American story and it needs to be told,” Banks said. “There’s always an element of resisting attempts to erase and change history. Even though some of these stories are familial, there’s a familiarity with people who have different backgrounds. There are always some commonalities in every story, even though they may not be your lived experience.”
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Though Banks didn’t grow up in Louisiana due to the nomadic lifestyle of her military family, they’d visit whenever they were in the area. Living away from her ancestral grounds, yet hearing the tales of her roots, instilled a question in her that continues to weave throughout her artistic work: What is home?
The exhibit will feature about 50 to 55 mixed-media pieces, all touching on themes of finding home and exploring the roots and stories of her own heritage and that of the African diaspora. They include drawings, an installation, textiles and artist books.
“Books take us to other places through reading descriptions,” Banks said. “An artist book has the opportunity to facilitate that by incorporating other senses. In addition to sight, the reader may turn the page but there may be no pages or they may smell or sound a different way. All those things can be manipulated toward whatever the subject of the book is. Some artist books have no words at all but communicate in the way that books do.”
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Banks grew up surrounded by creative people, including her mother, aunts and grandmother, who were always sewing and doing embroidery and crochet. Banks learned the skills, though didn’t consider herself an artist — it was just something she did.
And she continued to do it on the side throughout her career as a medical lab scientist, landing solo shows and contributing pieces to group shows through the years. Now retired, she can focus on her art full time.
“A lot of people think it’s unusual, but I’ve met a lot of scientists who are interested in the arts, if not outright artists themselves,” she said. “We think of science as being very strict, but there’s some creative aspects to it.”
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