Bananaland Ruby Lerner Bananaland Ruby Lerner

Bananaland

1988, Installation in Atlanta, GA

I think Bananaland might surprise some readers of the site. I am known for my work as an arts administrator and not as a maker. I studied acting at UNC-Chapel Hill but I was too bossy to be an actress waiting to get cast. So I started running things! For me, it turned out to be way more fun. 

  • Bananaland was a massive undertaking. George King and I considered ourselves to be “orchestrators,” so in a sense I was still putting my administrative skills to work! I still have the t-shirt, and the program is itself a history lesson.

    In 1979, The Sandinistas overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastatio Somoza, and established a “revolutionary” government. Of course, this was perceived by the U.S. as a “communist” threat in the hemisphere, and it could not be allowed to stand. In the 1980s, officials in the Reagan administration began secretly selling arms to Iran and planning to use the proceeds to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group in Nicaragua who were trying to oust the Sandinistas. It was known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Of course, all 11 of those administration officials indicted in the affair were eventually pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

    I was living in Atlanta in those years, and when the documentary filmmaker George King returned from a trip to Nicaragua, we realized that we didn’t really understand the history of U.S. involvement in Central America. The more research we did, the more surreal–and tragic–the story became.

    We eventually decided to tell the story using the banana as a metaphor. The “housing” for our non-linear narrative was a run-down 50s theme park with a cardboard aesthetic. As a former theater student, I was interested in Grotowski’s “poor theater” and Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, but we were also interested in spectacle, as well as how we are manipulated by misinformation and disinformation. In the late 1980s we could see that there was already an emerging need to cobble the “truth” together for yourself from multiple sources.

    In this archive, you can see some of the ephemera from the production and a number of the articles and reviews that were written about it. You can listen to a conversation that George King and I had with the curator and writer Tyler Stallings, currently the Director and Senior Curator at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, who was a student at the Atlanta College of Art at the time and contributed to the Bananaland production himself. You can also see George's delightful film documentation of Bananaland.

    In retrospect, I think I could have talked about this project more than I have. I remain quite proud of it. As you will see when you read the articles and reviews, it was pretty compelling, especially for its time.

    What would most surprise people to learn about you?

Read More