Jimmie Banks Retrospective

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Image by Jimmie Banks.

Art by Jimmie Banks.

If the artist’s job is to bring light to the unseen, then Jimmie Banks is an artist two times over: Once, in his twenty-two-year tenure as an electrician at Duke, and again, in his long practice of daily sketching and painting. Though you’ll find the occasional landscape in his work, Banks is most interested in people, from family and friends to celebrities and athletes; his canvases have something of the social documentary of Romare Bearden and something of the stark portraiture of Barkley L. Hendricks. This retrospective at one of the places where Banks helps keep the lights on, The Rubenstein Arts Center’s Gallery 235, reaches from his early works to the present to catch the span of a life and the growth of a patient, persistent lunch-break artist, building on glimpses of Banks’s work you might have caught at places like the Durham Public Library or Cup A Joe in Raleigh in past exhibits. —Brian Howe