Amy Johnquest has had a number of different gigs during her life, from designing posters for Downtown Sounds in Northampton, to painting signs and creating window displays for other businesses, to creating her own mixed media art.

But later this spring, Johnquest, known in these parts as the “Banner Queen” for paintings that draw inspiration from old circus sideshow banners, is stepping down from “the longest job I’ve ever had”: director of the Taber Art Gallery at Holyoke Community College.

Not only that: Johnquest, who lives in Holyoke and has a studio in Eastworks in Easthampton, is the only director the Taber has had.

“It’s a big change,” she said during a recent interview at her studio. “It’s been a part of my life for quite a while. But it feels like a good time to step down, maybe get someone in there who’s younger and a little more savvy about social media.”

Johnquest, who’s 64, began working at HCC in the late 1990s, before the school even had a formal art gallery. When she was first there, she recounted, artwork was exhibited in a student lounge in the school’s campus center, underneath the HCC cafeteria.

“It was not the nicest environment to display artists’ work,” she said, noting that students sometimes could be found making out on couches in the space “and there were coffee splashes on the walls.”

One time she curated a show and was holding a reception for the artist when a freelance teacher showed up with some students, saying he’d booked the lounge that evening for a kickboxing class.

The teacher was adamant about holding the class, Johnquest said with a laugh, and moved to one end of the room to do it. “So we had our reception on one end and they did their kickboxing on the other ... the artist actually thought it was pretty funny.”

But Johnquest felt something better was needed and approached HCC administrators about creating a genuine gallery — and in what she calls a moment of “cosmic synchronicity,” a Holyoke businessman named Donald Taber also approached the school around that time about housing his personal art collection.

That led to the creation of the Taber Art Gallery in 1998, a 20-by-40-foot space that has hosted many exhibits over the years, often done salon-style, with a focus on regional artists. Student shows are also a regular feature, and one is on view this month, in fact.

The Taber has also had an important role as teaching gallery, Johnquest says, where she’s hosted classes on art and had students write about their impressions.

She notes that she once hosted an exhibit of ceramics by Northampton multidisciplinary artist Chuck Stern and had students write about it, sharing some of their observations with Stern.

“He was thrilled to read them because it wasn’t the kind of formal criticism you’d have from an art critic,” she said.

And Johnquest, who enjoys exploring humor and offbeat themes in her own art, says she always kept an open mind when it came to hosting exhibits at Taber: “We’ve had some fabulous shows there from really wide range of artists.”

Early influences

Johnquest, a native of Ohio — her hometown, east of Cleveland, is named Novelty — says her interest in art was initially spurred in part by her mother, a ceramicist and painter, and her father, who wrote advertising copy.

After studying painting and drawing in college, she eventually filtered elements of her father’s experience into her own work by creating large paintings and banners that merged the aesthetics of old circus posters and advertisements with cheekier, more modern messages and imagery.

For instance, one of her mixed media pieces is a colorful poster that, using different shapes and ornate lettering of varying styles, offers a brief message — “Place Disposable Income Here Please” — with “Please” written on an arrow that points downward to a metal bucket.

Another piece shows two smiling female trapeze artists soaring above a rural landscape, one of them handing off a hot dog to the other beneath a curling banner that reads “Feed Your Children Well — The Amazing Healthy Hot Dog.”

Johnquest also has created her own versions of 19th-century cabinet cards and cartes de viste, small portrait photographs that people of that era would share with one another. She reworks these old materials, hand-painting new backdrops so that someone’s black and white face is surrounded by shimmering colors and psychedelic imagery.

“I think a sense of humor is a really important part of art,” she said.

One of her early clients, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, was Downtown Sounds. The Northampton music store mounted a number of her posters and banners in its display window, which then caught the eye of people representing Bruce Springsteen.

That led to Johnquest designing the artwork for a booklet that documented The Boss’ summer tour in 2003; in one section, she created images of all the band members as various circus performers and entertainers, with their black and white faces smiling out of their caricatures.

She curated a farewell exhibit, “Upward and Onward,” at the Taber earlier this year, inviting friends, family members, and colleagues to contribute work. The show featured about 150 pieces from 40 people and included photos and paintings of herself as a child.

“I’ve had a really good experience at the gallery, and I’ll miss it on some level,” she said.

But now she has more time for her own work, and she’s already got a new project in mind: creating a sort of suit or contraption in which she can perform as a moving animatronic fortune teller, like the one in the Tom Hanks movie “Big,” and hand out paper-written fortunes to people at live events.

“I’m looking forward to this,” she said.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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