Spencer Thornton Banks

Spencer Thornton Banks was a Black painter and commercial artist whose career in St. Louis spanned the 1930s to the 1980s. Banks moved to St. Louis at the age of fourteen and attended Sumner High School, where he studied with the influential St. Louis artist and educator Frederick C. Alston. Perhaps owing to this connection, Banks began exhibiting his work in St. Louis' Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists, sponsored by the Urban League of St. Louis, participating from 1931 to 1938.

Banks’ work merged aspects of traditional portrait painting, commercial art, pop culture and advertising. Among his earliest works was a series of posters painted for the Amytis Theatre, a St. Louis African-American cinema, in the 1930s. These posters were displayed in the theatre lobby and depicted popular figures such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Clark Gable and Greta Garbo. He also painted portraits of prominent black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington Carver.

Before he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Banks worked as an advertising artist for the Parks Drug Company and the Bells Drug Company. During the war, Banks began cartooning and created the comical character “Joe Boot,” a sailor who “taught others by doing everything wrong himself” (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 25, 1983).

Banks’ later work was marked by a shift toward political themes, morality, and the human conscience. Works such as his posters God’s moral law - Do unto others as you might have them do unto you, and Fight inflation, pray for peace, get prayer back in schools! unashamedly communicated Banks’ political convictions and moral imperatives, with titles reminiscent of the directness of the advertising and commercial art genres. Banks’ skill at poster design was recognized with an award in the People’s Art Center poster contest in 1946.

Outside of his art, Banks devoted much of his time to his business and serving the community. He owned and operated his Veteran’s Sign and Art Shop for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1977. He served as an art instructor for the Veterans Administration Program at Washington Technical High School and was pivotal in the founding of the People’s Art Center, the first integrated arts center in St. Louis, in the 1940s.

Banks continued painting until his death in 1983. He is buried in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.