It is with great pleasure that we announce that Willie Binnie’s painting “American Bank,” 2023 was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art for their permanent collection with the aid of Katherine Brodbeck and the Reese family. See it here in the collection
"(A)rchitecture, however quotidian and vernacular, or grandiose and posturing, is a form of visual culture that is often overlooked as being subject to innocent culture trends or as being purely utilitarian, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Obviously, major monuments–our nation’s capitol being a bombastic re-envisioning of the Roman Republic (in form, at least, but also in harkening to a fictitious, romantic past)–are more obvious examples, but I’m interested in things like banks, post offices, suburban homes, and gas stations, because they reveal so much about what we value as a collective. Brutalism in the United States is a strange beast because it verges on postmodernism in many cases–in that, for instance, a bank’s sign is also part of the architecture itself, as in Omaha (for Ed Ruscha) which is an actual edifice at 90th and Maple, or in American Bank which is in Waco, on the I-35 access road. To me these represent not just a certain era of our banking system (when banks had ten-plus drive-up suction tube lanes), but also the psychology of a certain moment in the country, as you allude to…this mythic past of a postwar America to which so many people seem to want to return, but which never actually existed, certainly not for anyone who wasn’t straight, white, and well-off." Willie Binnie interview with Bart Keijsers Koning 2020
