2020 Faculty Biennial Profile: Michael Banning

Meet the artists of the 2020 MCAD Faculty Biennial.

As a student in art school, Edward Hopper was one of the first artists whose work truly resonated with me. In his paintings, I saw familiar patterns of the American landscape revealed with both simplicity and mystery; it was as if the space around me had been edited down to its bare essentials, then bathed in raking light and clarity. Later, in graduate school, I became aware of the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi. I was struck by the human presence embodied within his paintings of seemingly empty interior spaces. Although his work was clearly of a different time and place, I immediately sensed the acuity both artists had for igniting the poetic imagination through interplays of light and architecture. These themes of light, space, and poetry were the genesis for this body of research work titled Hopper/Hammershøi.

To create this body of work, I travelled to the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, NY, and to one of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s former apartments, Strandgade 25, in Copenhagen, Denmark, to experience first-hand the spaces these artists once called home. Sketches, photographs, memories, and measurements of their homes then led to the creation of 1:8 scale models of specific rooms.

This painting, Edward Hopper’s “Road and Trees” Projected over a Model of Hammershøi’s Room, was created through a process that involved using one of these scale models as a three-dimensional screen upon which Hopper’s painting Road and Trees was digitally projected. The resulting layered and fragmented image distorts Hopper’s painting in unexpected ways and becomes a conversation between the artists, their rooms, time, and myself.

About Michael Banning

Michael Banning’s paintings and drawings of contemporary American landscapes and domestic interiors have been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in Chicago, Denver, New York, and Minneapolis, where he has been represented by the Groveland Gallery since 1998. He presented a solo exhibition of work at the Edward Hopper Museum in Nyack, NY in 2019.

In addition to being published in New American Paintings magazine in 2007, his work has also been included in national and regional group exhibitions at venues including the Manifest Creative Research Gallery, in Cincinnati, OH; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, WI; Charles Allis Art Museum and Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, in Milwaukee, WI; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, in Fort Wayne, IN; and the James J. Hill House Gallery of the Minnesota Historical Society, in Saint Paul, MN; among others.

Banning is the recipient of multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs as well as the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. His work is in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, Wisconsin Historical Society, Weisman Art Museum, Target Corporation, and the Securian Corporation, in addition to numerous private collections.

Banning received his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has taught drawing, painting, and design at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, and MCAD among other institutions.