Jack Shainman is battling Collette Blanchard for my favorite gallery. He reps some of my favorite artists, it's another gallery with friendly staff and a very well designed and laid out floor plan. This week two of my favorites have a show opening at the same time. John Bankston and Hank Willis Thomas. I plan to be there if my body cooperates, so I hope to see you there too.

JOHN BANKSTON

The Fabulist's Colored Life

February 12 - March 14, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 12, 2009, 6-8pm

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Fabulist's Colored Life, an exhibition of new paintings by John Bankston whose work is concurrently on view in the "30 Americans" exhibition that opened at the Rubell Family Collection during Art Basel Miami Beach in December. This is Bankston's fourth solo show at the gallery. Employing his signature coloring book style with equal parts painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration, he creates visual narratives. Like pages in a coloring book the overall compositions are graphic with large areas of negative space counterbalanced by patches of vibrant colors referencing various painting traditions from throughout the 20th Century. The Fabulist, a teller of tales, is both the imaginary author and subject of the stories. Large-scale paintings present scenes from his fantastical life. In the title, the word "colored" implies multiple meanings; topics of race, gender, identity, equity and isolation are all at play in these exquisite works that straddle the imagined and the real.

John Bankston has a forthcoming solo exhibition opening at the University of Alabama, Visual Arts Gallery, Birmingham, AL in March 2009. He was the subject of a one-person exhibitions at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, 2006, at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY in 2001 and has exhibited his work in numerous group exhibitions, including Black Panther Rank and File, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2006); Seeing Double: Encounters with Warhol, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2005); East of the Sun and West of the Moon, White Columns, New York, NY (2004); Splat Boom Pow: The Influence of Comics in Contemporary Art, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX (traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH) and Freestyle, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). Bankston is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Award (2004), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002), the SECA Art Award (2002), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2001). His works are represented in the collections of The Hartford Athenaeum, The de Young Museum, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University, Smith College Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum; the City of Chicago; the Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the University of Illinois, Chicago.