This series began when Brooklyn Museum curator Gene Baro selected my print “Banana 1976” to be included in his “Thirty Years of American Printmaking” exhibition and book by the same title. This was my first museum show while I was still a graduate student at RISD. He encouraged me to do a new banana print each year as a way to document changes in my style and subject matter. He said that when I had completed twenty or twenty-five prints, he would give me a show of my banana series at the Brooklyn Museum. Unfortunately he passed away in 1982 when I had only completed six banana prints. I did continue to make an annual print until 1991.