THE GABI AWARD

“Artists are making positive contributions to their communities every day, and the goal of the Gabi Award is to celebrate these contributions and encourage even greater engagement for the future,” said Suzanne Fetscher, president of the Center. “The Gabi Award provides yet another platform for promoting this important aspect.”  

Since the early 1990s, Bankemper has committed her practice to the intersection of nature and culture in private and public realms. Through community gardens, eco-activism and recycled sculptural objects, Bankemper has transformed abandoned lots, urban rooftops, overlooked historic sites, derelict parks and industrial sites into gardens that bring to life their own ecosystem with the people, birds and animals that habitat them. 

Bankemper was an artist-in-residence at the Center in 2001 during which time she was instrumental in creating the Dovetail Garden at Edwin Towers, a Charlotte Housing Authority residence for the elderly located near the Center. The Garden, which features ceramic bird houses created by Joan, is being refreshed as part of the award celebration.  

“Until this project, the residents of Edwin Towers never felt that they were part of a neighborhood,” Fetscher said.  “Through this project, the residents of Edwin Towers and Fourth Ward began working together to build an enjoyable environment of flora and fauna in an urban setting.”

The name of The Gabi Award is in honor of another of Center’s former artists-in-residence, Gabi Nkosi from Kwazulu Natal, South Africa, who was in residence Spring 2002.  Gabi’s work as a printmaker expressed the challenging and formative childhood she had as a black person in apartheid-era South Africa. Post-apartheid, Gabi worked at Caversham Center, an artist-in-residence program in Kwazulu Natal, as an artist apprentice. She also lead workshops to train uneducated black South Africans traditional beading and embroidery techniques. Skills acquired by the natives from these programs were meant to help alleviate their poverty and educate them about AIDS prevention. As an artist who was a catalyst for positive change, her work has been exhibited internationally and collected and admired by Toni Morrison and Oprah Winfrey. 

Future recipients of the Gabi Award will be artists who were significantly impacted by their residency experience at McColl Center for Visual Art, specifically by the community engagement aspect of the Center’s program.

“The inaugural Gabi award is well suited to acknowledge Joan’s accomplishments and to seed the promise of this remarkable artist's future projects,” Fetscher said. “Joan's work is not about authorship or ego, but truly about the community in which a project lives.”

The Gabi Award was made possible by a grant from the Foundation for the Carolinas Reemprise Fund.