Amy Cohen Banker is a visual artist based in New York City.

Biography

Cohen Banker was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx and Rockland County; she now divides her time between New York City and Massachusett's Berkshire County.

She is a Jewish , woman artist. She paints secular,political, metaphorical and religious themes.

Her early teachers included Richard Poussette Dart. She studied at the Museum of Modern Art children's program with William Scharf; she worked with him again with at the Art Student's League of New York. As a teenager, she spent time with Andy Warhol, Fillmore East characters, and such jazz and folk stars as Miles Davis and Melanie. From the time she was 15 she worked at local newspapers and radio stations. Meanwhile, her grandparents took her to New York's cultural institutions, to concerts with Leonard Bernstein, to the Museum of Natural History, and to dance classes at Carnegie Hall, where she was told to stick to modern art and stay away from ballet or she would hurt herself. She spent a great deal of time uptown around Columbia Univsity and downtown at NYU. All of these places, sights, sounds, movements, and feelings have been transformed and now inform her art.

Amy went to college at Cornell University and graduated with degrees in human development and family studies and in design and environmental analysis; fellow students included Christopher Reeve and Ed Marinaro. In 1975 she got married and moved to Philadelphia, where she worked in labor relations and compensation and benefits.

In 1978 Amy moved back to New York City. Meredith Elaine was born in 1980 and Allison Jane was born in 1982, and Amy decided to choose motherhood and art as her life's work. She moved to Japan with her husband, from whom she is now divorced, and had the opportunity to study Japanese Ikabana, sumi e, and silk embroidery, to mingle with an international crowd, and to run College Women’s Art Association lecture series and print shows with Sony, Mackenzie, and other international companies. She traveled extensively all over the Far East and Europe and picked up more art and business skills.

Her two-year stint in Japan over, Amy returned to New York and continued to work at the Isabel O'Neill School for Decorative Arts and the Museum of Modern Art. She began to win awards at the Art Student's League of New York, where her teachers William Scharf, Knox Martin and Rosina Florio all encouraged her to to do art full time. Ivan Karp urged her to devote all of time and energy to her art
as her work was "top draw". In a master class, Rudolph Baranick suggested that
she get out of the studio, to work in other art forms as well as paint.

She worked on set design at the Medicine Show and La Mama Theatre, on art education for the blind at MOMA and the Whitney Museum, and continued to do studio work and to teach. In 2004 she taught at New Jersey City University with
Ultraviolet...In 2006 she acted in the Warhol style movie "The Dead Life" directed by Ivy Nicholson and worked with Miestorm, Gunther Palmer, Meredith
Banker, Ian Couch,Vinnie Chibber, Penelope Palmer and others. Her agent, Kevin Kushel filmed much of it. Amy
has been busy painting a new series of Monterey Pop inspired portraits at
the CVB SPACE. She has worked there for the last three years with well
known artist,illustrator and performance artist, Cynthia Von Buhler. They are
planning a special Warhol inspired show in early 2007. Banker is now the Director
of National Association of Women's Artists 14th Street Gallery,New York City,New York State. She is a member
of the Feminist Art Project, Rutgers University,New Jersey. Cohen Banker is also registered
at WAAND, Women Artists Archives National Directory. Amy curated a show at the
Loren Ellis Gallery for four women artists(1999- Apocalyn, Alice Philllips
Swistel, Jane Balanoff, Loren Ellis) showing the eclectic syles of mature art
from well rounded women. She curated a show in 2005 at the CVB SPACE to demonstrate important emerging art from men and women. Cohen Banker is a recent
contributor to the Loren Ellis Art for Healing Book of art and poetry about 9/11
sponsored by New York City public funding and NYSCA. Cohen Banker sees the challenge to
balance her love for service,aesthetics, painting ,educating, writing.

Reviews and accolades

Knox Martin says that Cohen Banker "will be a leading force in the 21st century art world. She has earned admiration and respect as a distinguished American artist."

Richard Barr of MOMA says, "Her education and art background is extraordinary in range. I would rate her 24 karat gold."

Elizabeth Liberty, a head of PEN and one of her advocates, calls Amy "deeply spiritual."

Laura Heon of MASS MOCA says that her "work is bold, imaginative, and unique."

Jerome Ziegler says, "'Her work and talent is adaptive, innovative, addressing integrative, quantitative and qualitative forms from a broad continuum of multidisciplinary approaches from the physical, life, social and behavioral sciences to problem solving. She is concerned with translating her findings into meaningful and effective ways to improve the lives of children, families, and
communities."

Jonathan Goodman says, "Banker's method , then, lies in a painterly treatment of real things, such the abstraction never becomes a flight of its own. Her brushstrokes project feeling in the form of affection......for the physical act of paintings, its ability to record the gesture as a material decision. At the same time, her art seeks a grand ground, one in which color and composition are used for their ability to connect with a mythic truthfulness. While Banker's logic remains resolutely painterly her art speaks to a search for the real, as much as it exists in mind as it does in nature. While her art reflects the formal and psychological investigations of a woman coming to terms with many influences, among them philosophy, poetry, music, and myths, she remains committed to painting, its ability to convey feeling and thought, the world that is real and the world that is imagined."

Vivian Raynor, a contributiong critic to the New York Times, writes, "Though best described as an Abstract Impressionist, Banker draws
inspiration from the parent movement in a way that confirms its immortality while at the same time pointing to its future development.
She is an American building on America's first contribution to Modernism."

Relicts project

Beginning in 2001 Amy has developed the Relicts Project as a tribute to Allison Banker and Monique Goldstrom; it is her way of facing loss and working toward renewal through poetry, music, installation and video. She projects this installation at CVB SPACE,New York City; plans include India, Krakow, Poland, and the Hermitage Museum,Moscow. The fund in memory of Allison Jane Banker,
at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,for Hodgkins Disease Research, New York City is another tribute.

Amy has extensive public and community art exhibitions with National Association of Women Artists and the New York Art World and at institutions such as Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. She also has exhibited at the Metropolitan Opera House of New York City, the Smithsonian Institutions, the Jewish Museum of London. Madison Avenue Art Walk, NOHO Art Walk, FEYVA, LES, Deutschebank Offices, Princeton University, and Cornell University. Art galleries that have exhibited her work include Janos Gat and Eickholt Gallery. She also has worked with traveling shows in Switzerland,and Italy and with the D/Ars Foundation. Her work has been shown at the United Nations,the Dag Hammerskjold Lobby Gallery and The Venezualan Consulate, New York City. Her internet presence is extensive.

External links

Personal Website and Amy Banker Art

New York Art World

http://www.Ovoworks.Smugmug.com

Artnet

CVBSPACE.com