Conceptual artist Anna Banana died on November 29 in the town of Roberts Creek in British Columbia, Canada, at the age of 84. A pioneer in mail art, performance, and alternative publishing, Banana left an indelible mark on experimental practice and the global network of artist collaboration.
The artist was born Anne Lee Long on February 24, 1940, in Victoria, British Columbia. It was at Vancouver’s experimental New School, where she taught elementary-age students, that she received the nickname “Anna Banana” in 1968. She went on to spend two years at Esalen Institute, and after falling into a box of bananas at a party in Big Sur in 1970, she embraced the moniker, legally changing her name in 1985.
“People aren’t comfortable with my name,” the artist told journalist Portia Priegert in 2015. “And, often, it goes to sexual things. Or it’s goofy and childlike.”
She’d begun as a textile artist but turned to more participatory forms in the 1970s. In 1971, Banana launched the absurdist Banana Rag, a newsletter which connected her to the International Mail Art Network (IMAN). In 1973, she moved to San Francisco, mixing with Bay Area Dadaists such as Bill Gaglione and publishing VILE magazine, which documented the international mail art circle, a critical response to General Idea’s FILE magazine (itself a riff on Life) that had since let go of its correspondence art roots. She operated Banana Productions, which published the International Art Post, and she referred to her title there as “Top Banana.”
In 1984, Banana published her essay “Women in Mail Art” in Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity, highlighting the often overlooked contributions of women in the field and adapted from her 1978 introduction to a VILE issue subtitled “Fe-Mail Art.”
“Anna Banana was a pre-internet networker and zine publisher that communicated across the globe with the yellow sheets of her Banana Rag. She sought out community in person and via the mail — she was one of the most prominent and productive members of the international mail art network,” Zanna Gilbert, a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute and a scholar of mail art, told Hyperallergic in an email.
In 2015, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presented the retrospective Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana, during which the artist gave away around 1,200 items from her personal correspondence archive to exhibition visitors, a project known as “Regifting the Bananas.” Last year, Banana was included in Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum.
Banana’s work did not explicitly address the politics of agriculture or the industry’s abuses, but her use of the fruit as a symbol connects to broader conversations about global trade and cultural iconography. Her performances were highly interactive, exemplified by her 1993 project “Proof Positive Germany is Going Bananas.” The parodic research tour of German cities explored what the artist termed the “new German banana consciousness” following reunification, when West Germans greeted citizens of the East with once-scarce bananas.
Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” (2019), an artwork consisting of a banana duct-taped to the wall, has recently captured public and market attention after it sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s. But Banana’s decades-long engagement with the fruit as an artistic symbol offers a more nuanced treatment. Her playful adoption of the motif can be seen as an early example of how everyday objects can become powerful vehicles for social interaction and anti-market exchange.
“On entering Anna’s house on the Sunshine Coast in Roberts Creek, you had to navigate the archive shelves stacked with Bananology and her artistamp production machine,” Vincent Trasov, a close friend and collaborator based in Vancouver and Berlin (who assumed another fictional persona, Mr. Peanut, in the early 1970s), told Hyperallergic in an email. “The real order of the day, however, was art and ideas. Anna found everything there.”
In January 2025, ChertLüdde in Berlin will exhibit a selection of “Banana Greetings” and other mailings from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, which is housed at the gallery, alongside works by Wolf-Rehfeldt and Trasov. “Anna’s language is distinguished by intensity, humor, sharp criticism, and directness as few others,” ChertLüdde owner Jennifer Chert told Hyperallergic. “Her presence in the archive enriches us immensely.”
Banana’s legacy lies in her ability to build both persona and community, physically and conceptually. Her archive is housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
She is survived by her daughter, Dana Long.
