FEB 27, 2025 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Sydney McGarr (A&E Editor)
Last Thursday, Feb. 20, The Fine Arts Center at Colorado College hosted book, fiber and multi-media artist Alisa Banks for a free community event launching her new exhibition, “Unerased.”
According to the museum website, “Unerased” uses textiles, fibers and plants to explore links between contemporary culture, Banks’ Louisiana Creole heritage and the African Diaspora.
The exhibit, which is held in the Holaday and Seagraves Galleries of the museum, is mostly comprised of mixed media work and textile collages that each have an essential level of meaning in the artist’s personal life.
Banks approaches all of her work with one big question in mind: “What is home?”
She shared with the crowd that she grew up in a quick moving family and never felt connected to her hometown roots in Louisiana.
In her adult life, much of her artistic journey has grown from a desire to know more about the place she came from. She called her process of reconnecting with her personal history “root work.”
“Root work for me is a way to reconcile with my semi-nomadic background. I speak at a distance from my roots, but I am still connected to them,” she said.
Among many pieces of work relating to archiving her personal family history, the gallery also displays some of Banks’ less personally centered work. One example is a 1990s US History Textbook that Banks’ has marked up with extra information that makes the narrative more inclusive.
“I think that we do our young people a very big disservice because the richness and the tapestry that is this place is lost because of generalization,” she said.
The opposite room from the textbook holds a variety of colorful textile works, many of which include pieces of handwritten text printed onto various fabrics. Most of these texts are family stories, derived from hours of research, digging through family archives and interviewing family members.
On a less visual note, the exhibit also includes a piece called “History of The People,” a collection of scents, stored on cotton balls in glass jars, meant to represent the material culture that enslaved people would have brought with them through the Middle Passage.
The smell “book” is made up of six different smells: roots, journey, arrival, harrow, protest and visioning.
“Some of those are very concrete smells and some of them are very abstract smells,” said Banks. “We may not speak the same language, but we can smell.”
She composed each scent herself after taking perfume classes.
Banks holds a BS in medical laboratory science and an MFA in visual art from Texas Woman’s University. Her works in various mediums are displayed all over the world, including the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. She is also an exhibiting artist for the Art in Embassies program, displaying her work in US Embassies globally.
Julian Sico, the Printer of The Press at Colorado College, curated her exhibit. Sico says she first came across Banks’ work as a graduate student at the University of Alabama. She was immediately inspired.
“I was very, very excited to invite her here,” says Sico. “I’m so excited to curate this show with her and with the wonderful FAC.”
The strong desire to preserve stories is at the heart of Banks’ work. She believes that in a moment of stark political divide with an emphasis on the repression of stories, work like hers is more important than ever.
“I feel like what I’m doing is a form of resistance,” she said. “Making sure the stories go on and understanding what actually is instead of the soundbites is a way to keep straight on the path.”
Alisa Banks: “Unerased” opens on March 7.