Multimedia artist Hannah Banciella opens one-woman show

Miami-based multimedia artist Hannah Banciella is getting an early birthday present this year. On April 7, the day before she turns 24, Banciella’s one-woman show, “Communing with Poppies,” will debut at the SPAACES gallery in Sarasota.

Among the people expected to attend the opening reception — from 6-8 p.m. at 2087 Princeton St. — are Banciella’s aunt and uncle, who live in Sarasota.

Like her Cuban-born father, Banciella has long been a doodler, scrawling drawings on scraps of paper with pen or pencil. However, she never imagined she would grow up to be a professional artist.

“My dream was to represent the United States in swimming at the Olympics,” Banciella said in a telephone interview from her Miami home.

Courtesy photo

These days, Banciella doesn’t do much swimming, though she does enjoy taking long walks in Coral Gables and Cocoanut Grove. When she’s on vacation, hikes in woodsy areas are a must. 

Banciella’s father, who came to the U.S. from Cuba in 1965, encouraged her to take an art elective in middle school that ultimately changed the direction of her life. The class was followed by a summer arts camp and then a magnet high school for students interested in pursuing careers in design and architecture.

Despite his imaginative doodling of faces, Banciella’s father became a lawyer, not a painter. 

“Communing with Poppies,” which lasts just a week, isn’t Banciella’s first one-woman show. For her thesis project at the University of Florida, she staged “The Silence that Helps the Flowers Grow” at the Gainesville Fine Arts Association in 2021. At the University of Florida, she earned a bachelors of fine arts in drawing and a certificate in ceramics.

As she did in “Silence,” Banciella uses a combination of charcoal and ceramics (three teapots) in her arresting Sarasota show. There is also a red oil painting, which was the study for the larger charcoal works. 

The giant drawings of a pensive Banciella dressed in a camisole and lacy peignoir were inspired by poetry that unleashed repressed emotions. “Both shows are about letting go of a piece of you and moving forward,” she says.

To create her artwork, Banciella first takes a photograph of herself and projects it on a large piece of paper hung on a wall. After she draws an outline of her figure, she fills in the interior using charcoal by consulting the photograph.

“They’re all drawn. They’re not copied,” she says of her portraits. “It takes a few weeks to figure out the values and fill them in.” By values, she means the myriad shades of grey she achieves with her charcoal stick and rubbing tools, including her fingers. The show in Sarasota took her a year to create, Banciella says.

Right now, Banciella is working as an artist’s assistant to Alexis Diaz in Miami, helping to paint murals, on canvases and paper print. She also performs prep work and finishes pieces based on instructions from Diaz.

In addition to creating large-scale charcoal pieces, Banciella is interested in becoming an artist in residence and traveling to learn more about art. In May 2019, she studied in Paris in order to “recontextualize” classical and contemporary works from museums.

On Banciella’s wish list right now is an artist in residence program at the Everglades National Park. She applied once and was not accepted, but she will try again.

Asked if she expects to continue to focus on her own image, Banciella says yes. “I’m stuck on figures because that’s the way I see motion and interaction. A landscape would be hard to get my point across,” she says.

However, nature plays a big role in Banciella’s art. In an artist’s statement, she says, “My charcoal work places self-portraits within plant-covered environments. The plant life captures the duality of these expansive natural environments — both alluring and unsettling.”

Banciella says she draws inspiration from poets and artists such as Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück and Katherine Bradford. They “are able to create an immersive world within their poems or paintings through written imagery, playfulness and mark-making,” the statement says.

“SPAACES is delighted to support Banciella’s art career with a one-woman show,” said founder Marianne Chapel Junker. “We believe Banciella’s highly skilled and deeply considered artworks as well as her dedication to her studio practice and fine art career will take her far into the professional art world.”

Junker teaches fine art at the Ringling College of Art and Design. In 2018, she founded SPAACES, a nonprofit exhibition and studio space, to improve working conditions for Sarasota’s socially engaged artists. 

Junker may have given Banciella first big break, but her father, Ricardo (“Ric”) Banciella, remains her biggest fan. Saturday April 1 found him standing on a ladder helping his daughter hang her giant creations after making the three-hour drive to Sarasota. “Hannah’s charcoal drawings create a lot of dust, but the end product is definitely worth it,” he says.