When Harry Belafonte released his famous Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) in 1956, he did not intend to celebrate tropical joy or offer a festive anthem to liven up Caribbean cocktail parties in white suburban America. The song—based on a traditional Jamaican work chant sung by night-shift dock workers loading bananas while waiting for the tally man to count their labor at dawn—is, in truth, a weary prayer, a rhythmic lament. Its upbeat tone masks an exhausting, underpaid routine marked by waiting and invisibility. Paradoxically, its meteoric rise into the American mainstream erased this background. The public embraced it as a sonic exoticism, a picturesque piece ideal for themed parties, completely disconnected from its origins. Thus, a song about hard labor, exploitation, and the longing for rest became an unwitting symbol of colonial escapism, revealing how a culture can be celebrated and, at the same time, misunderstood to the point of caricature.
Given this and many similar precedents—and while I don’t believe something quite the same could happen in the realm of visual arts—it is not idle to reflect on a body of work that could risk falling prey to misinterpretation. I’m referring to Erika NJ Allen’s exhibition This Is Not a Banana Republic, presented at the Weston Art Gallery (650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202).
Photographic documentation courtesy of the artist
The curatorial statement distills the focus with sober clarity: Erika NJ Allen creates immersive mixed-media installations exploring her personal journey and the broader immigrant experience. This Is Not a Banana Republic unfolds as a symbolic battleground depicted through clay sculptures and evocative photography. Here, the resilience of the human body stands as a defiant gesture against oppressive systems. The banana, once a simple fruit, emerges as a potent metaphor for the artist's struggle and the enduring war against the immigrant experience.
But first, I want to talk about where these installations—easily dismissed by some as “banana art”—actually come from. And of course, I want to talk about Erika.
Born in Guatemala City and currently based in Cincinnati, where she teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Erika NJ Allen does not present herself through the usual channels of artistic lineage. Her practice did not emerge from elite academies or a youth immersed in art, but from a path shaped by detours, losses, and acts of rebuilding that now form a voice of remarkable honesty. Her work—deeply autobiographical and incisively critical—sits at the very heart of contemporary debates on migration, colonialism, and power, without sacrificing aesthetic joy or the impulse toward dialogue.
For years, Erika believed that art was not a viable life path. In her environment, an artistic career was seen as an unproductive hobby, something not to be taken seriously. Like so many others, she was encouraged to pursue law or medicine. And for a time, she tried. But after losing the job that had promised stability and a good salary, she began listening inward. With a digital camera in hand and a desire to learn how to use it, she enrolled in the GED—“like giving birth to a child,” she would later say—and soon after, at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she studied photography and design as a non-traditional student.
Photographic documentation courtesy of the artist
She first encountered clay while working with Wave Pool in Cincinnati. Hired to help launch a free ceramics program for the community, she found herself—almost by accident—working with the material for the first time. Though she had no formal background in ceramics, the urgent need to create with her hands led her to explore this new language. Still recovering—unaware that a deeper transformation was underway—she began modeling, instinctively, the foods her body craved: pineapples, avocados, salmon, bananas. Nourishing, vibrant foods, full of light and water. That’s how her artistic voice emerged. “I could only sculpt what I had already digested,” she would say. That intuitive, bodily gesture became the core of her practice.
The decision to work with the banana as a symbolic image came later, during her MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art. It was there that she found the space and artistic maturity to develop this motif, which has since become a central thread in her work.
This Is Not a Banana Republic articulates that shift from the intimate to the collective. Allen transforms the banana—an everyday object, tropicalized to the point of parody—into a dense and contradictory symbol: a phallic emblem, a fruit of export, a witness of empires. A recipe for Banana Shrimp Curry, lifted from a 1950s Chiquita Banana cookbook and recreated letter by letter in ceramic, welcomes viewers into a space that mimics a plantation, with painted banana leaves and suspended sculptures that resemble venomous snakes camouflaged among the fruit.
That snake—the yellow beard—appears again and again in her narrative, a silent threat embedded in the everyday. Allen has never been to a banana plantation, but that does not prevent her from constructing a critical fiction based on visible signs. What matters is the gesture: to reveal what is hidden inside the exotic fruit lining the shelves of the global North. If just one person, she says, begins to question the origin of a banana after seeing her work, then it has been worthwhile.
The piece Domestic Fallout, recently exhibited at the Carnegie, extends this critique into other material registers. In it, Allen combines ceramic bananas with uranium glass kitchenware—once symbolic of modernity and domestic elegance—to demonstrate how extractive economies infiltrate everyday life. The spectral fluorescence of the glass under black light links the act of serving fruit to the buried history of colonialism, environmental toxicity, and the military-industrial complex. In the artist’s words, the aim is to turn kitchens and tables into silent witnesses of global conflict.
But Erika NJ Allen is not interested in canceling cultures or imposing dogmas. “I don’t want to abolish banana culture,” she says clearly. Her work is not designed to scandalize, but to awaken empathy. Empathy for those who migrate, for those who survive, for those who turn pain into something shareable. And to do so, she needs art to be tactile, accessible, imperfect. A conduit, not a pedestal.
Her upcoming project—a group exhibition titled Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams, organized by the Urban Native Collective in October 2025—will place her in dialogue with Indigenous artists reflecting on legacy, futurity, and resilience. It’s not a performative gesture of inclusion, but a natural continuation of her commitment to community knowledge, oral history, and art as a tool for symbolic repair.
The vertigo of a meteoric career is not part of her ambition. Her work ripens quietly—in community workshops, in residencies like the Archie Bray Foundation, in prizes like Artadia or the NCECA Emerging Artist Award. But above all, it matures in the coherence between lived experience and artistic practice. Each of her pieces is an intimate and radical statement of existence: “I’m here. I’m alive. And this is what I have to offer.”
In times when art easily dissolves into self-celebration or hollow outrage, Erika NJ Allen offers—unapologetically—the testimony of the affected body and the transfigured object.
Exoticism distracts. Those who don’t look beyond, miss the deeper language at work here.
PS
- Notations on Ritual, curated by Sso-Rha Kang, is on view at The Carnegie (1028 Scott Blvd, Covington, KY 41011) from March 14 through August 16, 2025.
- This Is Not a Banana Republic—A Manifesto of Empire Domination, the Immigration Experience, and Empathy is currently on view at the Weston Art Gallery (650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202) through August 24, 2025.
- Her upcoming project, Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams, organized by the Urban Native Collective, will take place in October 2025 at the Contemporary Arts Center (44 E 6th St, Cincinnati, OH 45202).