Joan Bankemper

May 30 - July 19, 2024

A Mother Daughter Collab: Joan Bankemper and Sophie Bankemper Frances

From May 30 through July 19, 2024, Nancy Hoffman Gallery will present the first ceramic sculpture exhibition of mother-daughter artists Joan Bankemper and Sophie Bankemper Frances.

Each of the collab team works on a specific aspect of the ceramic sculptures: Sophie creates the biomorphic forms, more interested in their sculptural shapes and character than in creating a vessel. She hand-builds the sculptural forms intuitively, some of which make reference to the human body, providing her Mother, Joan, with richly varied surfaces on which to work. Joan creates the skin, the color, the handwriting that gives each work its distinction.

The first piece on which the duo worked together, in 2024, Piedmont, is an irregular bulbous shape that narrows at the neck, suggesting it might be a recipient for flowers. Tiny porcelain flowers adorn it, along with clay circles of all shapes and sizes in pale silvery gray. There is a contrapunto energy between the delicate flower beds, the variegated shapes and sizes of circles, and the rugged green grout suggesting a garden, and the somewhat (intentionally) unrefined asymmetrical shape.

Might this family duo be commenting on the state of the world that is no longer refined, in a state of flux, asymmetrical, with a lot of unpleasantness, in juxtaposition to the coming of Spring with its richness and beauty? This is the simplest work in the exhibition. The other sculptures are larger, pierced with openings with twists and turns enabling Joan to go to work with her imagination and palate.

About the Artists:

Joan Bankemper

Joan Bankemper is known for her ceramic mosaic vessels, which grew out of 25 years of commitment to creating urban gardens with the help of surrounding communities. She has worked on projects in New York; Boston; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; Jenkintown, Pennsylvania and in Italy, among other venues, addressing the relationship of people to nature as reflected in the contemporary urban landscape. Her garden projects range from restorative healing herb gardens, to gardens based on the shape of the human body, to planting 600 giant sunflowers, which grew from the ruins of a Southern flour mill. Her ceramic mosaics followed her love of nature and its transformations as the seasons change. She loves flowers, birds, bees, all symbols of the garden and the creatures that help pollinate and cross-pollinate the flowers. Working in the way a collagist might, Bankemper created vessels, beginning with a simple glass vase at the core or a hand-built vessel form of clay. The ceramic urn that surrounded the vessel is its first “skin,” which the artist builds and often breaks. These were not simple pieces; they are complex tapestries of life.

Joan Bankemper was born in Covington, Kentucky in 1959. She received a B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mount Royal Graduate School, Baltimore. She also attended Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights and the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The George Sugarman Foundation, California, the North Carolina Arts Council and the Council on the Environment, New York. The artist resides in Warwick, New York and New York City.

Sophie Bankemper Frances

Sophie Bankemper Frances was born in New York. She received her BFA in 2020 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sophie started making ceramics while in Chicago and continues to work in her ceramic studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her practice involves primarily ceramic stoneware to make large scale abstract forms through hand-building. This is her first showing in NYC.