Gabby Banks is a conceptual painter whose practice investigates representations of Blackness in contemporary painting through systems of refusal, technical apprenticeship, and revision. Working primarily in portraiture and figuration, Banks challenges conventional expectations placed on representational Black painting by resisting imagery that restricts Blackness’s legibility as spectacle, trauma narrative, or search for humanized empathy. Instead, her work proposes an alternative framework for engaging Black subjects, one rooted in formal examination, critical analysis, and close looking. 

Drawing on traditions of copying and appropriation in painting, Banks approaches painting as a practice of study rather than imitation. In her ambition to achieve a multilingual aesthetic fluency, Banks cites a visual language “after” painters defining our contemporary canon of Black figuration and portraiture. Through these translations, she constructs images that exist across multiple formal literacies, reflecting the ambiguity and complexity of Blackness. 

Through painting, Banks has dedicated her practice to the practices of those committed to rendering Black subjects. She seeks to call attention to a visual legacy of Black representation, one that challenges representational redundancy while inviting Blackness to exist as a condition of being rather than an apparatus of persuasion. 

Born in Nassau, Bahamas, Gabby Banks (b.1997) received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Northwestern University in Art Theory and Practice. Banks has exhibited internationally, showcasing in The Bahamas and the United Kingdom, and has completed fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. As a practicing artist and creative professional, she hopes to contribute to and learn from diverse creative spaces that value experimentation and social engagement. Currently focused on subverting the anti-critical culture surrounding Black contemporary art, Banks is eager to be challenged by her ambition to develop alternative interrogations of representational painting.

❋