April Banks
April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social engagement and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience.
April’s recent work time travels through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning systems. She is interested in amplifying lesser known stories, challenging the gaze, and giving narrative to the erased and intentionally forgotten. In February 2021 she completed her first permanent public art sculpture “A Resurrection in Four Stanzas” in Santa Monica, CA, commemorating a former Black community erased by eminent domain.
Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Ethiopia. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections.
April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999.
April is also the producer of Tea Afar, a nomadic storytelling experience, launched in 2016. For over a decade she made art that raised awareness and pointed to the global disparity in food security, farmer's rights and fair trade. Tea Afar was conceived as a salve—bringing us together across borders—for the divisiveness and exploitation that is propagated by a global trade economy and discriminatory travel bans.
April currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Photo by Leroy Hamilton.