Joan Bankemper (b.1959 USA) uses recycled sculptural objects and plant material to transform abandoned lots, urban rooftops, overlooked historic sites, derelict parks, and industrial sites into gardens that promote fellowship and learning. Bankemper’s community-based art gardens are often filled with healing herb plants along with her unique shard pottery birdhouses. Bankemper also creates garden-inspired shard vases and sculptures that incorporate ceramic flowers, birds, kitsch figurines and teapots. Exuberant and colorful, these vases bring to mind the fertile and overabundant, late-summer garden.

Bankemper was born in Covington, Kentucky. She has created works at Wave Hill, NY; Art Pace, San Antonio, TX; Abbazia Benedettina, Milan, Italy; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Lux Institute, Encinitas, CA; Bellevue Hospital, NY; as well as several bird sanctuaries up and down the East Coast. She has received awards from Sugarman Fournation, National Endowment for the Arts and recently was named the first recipient of the McColl Center Gabi Award. After earning her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Bankemper moved to New York City, where she currently resides.

Joan Bankemper spent her residency painting, doing research, and riding her bike through the park and the community gardens around the museum in the Spring of 1999. Bankemper passed many hours in the archives engrossed by Isabella Stewart Gardner’s travel journals. Gardner recorded notes about her adventures through Europe, East Asia, and parts of the United States and Cuba, alongside photographs, botanical specimens, and other items she collected and pasted into albums during each trip. These volumes felt familiar to Bankemper who kept her own “gardener’s diary” that included notes, drawings, and pasted ephemera. Bankemper also researched Gardner’s life, her gardens at her Green Hill estate in Brookline, as well as her interests in plant cultivation. A few examples of flora and fauna seen in the Courtyard today are descendents of plants from Gardner’s time.

The experience of nature within the museum is a fabricated construction, the result of extensive labor of the museum’s staff instead of natural systems of biological exchange. Bankemper was intrigued by this notion and was often found chatting with the horticulture staff in the Courtyard and in the museum’s greenhouses. She was struck by the installation of architectural elements in the Courtyard and with how the collection framed the garden. Bankemper devoted time to drawing in these spaces and used the plant material as a resource for a new suite of botanical gouaches.

During her residency Bankemper also began designing a community herb garden that she envisioned for the Fenway Victory Gardens. This community garden, located near the museum, was the first Victory Garden in the United States and is part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace park system that stretches from the Boston Common to West Roxbury. Bankemper wanted to create a space that brought neighbors together to work and share experiences. The garden was constructed and planted the following year in conjunction with her exhibition, A Gardner’s Diary. Fifth graders from the Farragut School, a participant in the museum’s School Partnership Program, and senior residents of the Fenway neighborhood who lived near the garden, worked with Bankemper to construct, cultivate, and care for the garden. The Public was invited to use, enjoy and learn from their collaborative efforts.

In October, Bankemper visited the Ferraugt School and the Peterbourough Senior Center. She introduced the students and seniors to the scents and healing properties of a variety of herbs and outlined her ideas for a human-shaped healing garden in the center of the plot. Bankemper asked that the group research several varieties of plants and keep a Gardener’s Diary about their findings. Under her direction, the group weeded, spread peat moss, and turned over the soil in the Fenway garden in preparation for spring.

Over the fall and winter the students and seniors made several visits to the museum where they toured the greenhouses with the museum’s gardeners and asked questions about the care of the plants. Students sketched in the Courtyard, embossed their sketches in foil, and mounted them to use as covers for their Gardeners’ Diaries. They continued their herb research in pairs and chose an herb that they would be interested in growing. The class also began a composting project with a volunteer from the Harvard School of Public Health, also a neighbor and Farragut partner. In the first weeks of March, the class used their research to decide on 13 herbs to start from seed in the classroom: chamomile, lavender, celery, hyssop, catnip, aniseed, peppermint, lemon balm, echinacea, daisy, thyme, comfrey, flax.

Bankemper returned in April, 2000, and again in May, to install new work in the Special Exhibition gallery and to work with the group on the garden. They planted the herbs which had been started from seed in a central body-shape and surrounding peripheral beds. Students brought composting worms from their classroom and released butterflies they had hatched. During the Farragut Family night on June 6, their Gardeners’ Diaries were displayed and several students shared information about the process they used to make their diaries and experience working on the Healing Garden project with visitors. The garden was included in the school’s curriculum and was maintained by Pat Keyo’s fifth grade students, seniors, and volunteers from the museum staff until 2006; well beyond Bankemper’s exhibition.