Remy José Banks risked annoying his fellow musicians in June 2019 when he met up with Ashley Renee Condina on a hotel rooftop bar in Manhattan.
Mr. Banks, best known for being a founding member of the hip-hop collective World’s Fair, was booked to perform a couple of miles away that night with his experimental trio, PWRLVL9000; Ms. Condina, whose sense of style had caught his eye years earlier, proved a distraction.
Hours before he was to take the stage at HK Hall in Hell’s Kitchen, “I told the guys in my group, ‘I’ve got this mini date at the Gansevoort with this girl Ashley,’” he said. This made them a little nervous.
“They were like, ‘You’re bouncing around too much,’” Mr. Banks said. “But I was like, ‘I don’t care.’”
Ms. Condina, 37, is an artist and filmmaker. She lives in Kensington, Brooklyn, in the same house she and her younger brother grew up in with their father, Richard Condina, and grandmother, Antoinette Santangelo. She took regular trips to Manhattan to visit her mother, Kimberly Romano, after her parents’ separation in the 1990s.
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At St. John’s University in Queens, she studied psychology for a year, then transferred to Brooklyn College to major in art history. But “I never retrieved my degree,” though she earned enough credits to graduate, she said.
Making art, especially land art, had long been a more important pursuit. A road trip to the western United States in 2018 reinforced her love for the medium, which involves integrating works directly into the natural environment. It’s still her primary practice, though her portfolio now includes ceramics, performance pieces and textile works often made using earth and blood-dyed yarn.
Mr. Banks, 37, grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. His father, Marc José Banks, died before he was born. His mother, Lisa Bryant, later had two more children; he has a half brother and half sister.
His knack for making music started early, around the family dinner table. “I’d do rap performances, sing my favorite Jagged Edge songs,” he said, referring to the R&B group from Atlanta. By sixth grade, he was known among classmates as the kid who was always writing verses.
At Nassau Community College in Long Island, he briefly studied fashion design and marketing. But “music was kind of prevalent in my life at that point,” he said, so he didn’t finish. In 2007, a friend from high school invited him to record in a basement studio a few blocks from Mr. Banks’s home. His hope was to follow in the footsteps of other rappers from his part of the city.
“In the ’90s, a lot of artists from Queens were coming into themselves,” Mr. Banks said. “When I was a kid, Nas and Mobb Deep were my heroes.” A memory of rushing outside with an aunt who lived in Queensbridge to see the duo Mobb Deep shoot a video at a nearby basketball court was formative. “The whole neighborhood came out to watch,” he said.
In 2007, he became a member of the group Children of the Night. In 2009, they evolved into the larger collective, World’s Fair. If ascending to Nas-level heights in the hip-hop industry didn’t quite happen, a significant following in New York’s underground rap scene did.
Mr. Banks was a veteran performer by 2019, when he and Ms. Condina rendezvoused at the Gansevoort. He didn’t discount the risk of spreading himself too thin that night. But since 2012, when a mutual friend introduced them at the Flat, a now-closed bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the impression she made hadn’t faded.
“It was just a nice-to-meet-you kind of thing,” Mr. Banks said. But “I remember very clearly she had these bangs and these glasses. I was like, this girl looks completely different from everybody else.”
“I’m very expressive with how I dress,” Ms. Condina said. “I want to be viewed as an individual.”
Mr. Banks was checking Instagram seven years later when a tagged photo of Ms. Condina caught his eye. “I was like, Oh, snap — it’s that girl,” he said.
In the space of a few DMs, she told him she was heading into Manhattan on June 21 to hear her brother Christian Condina, known as DJ CCNY, spin records at the rooftop bar.
“She said, ‘Feel free to come through’,” he said.
He was mindful of his midnight gig at HK Hall while they sipped cocktails poolside and bonded over growing up in a less gentrified New York City. Mr. Condina set a mood with favorites, including a song by 50 Cent featuring Destiny’s Child and another by the Notorious B.I.G.
“The music was very nostalgic for us,” Ms. Condina said. When Mr. Banks, who had been watching the clock, left at 11 p.m., he promised himself he would see her again after his gig. They met in the wee hours at the West Village bar the One Trick Pony. “He had been texting me the whole time” from the gig, she said.
Three days later, on their first official date, both say they fell in love. After dinner at the Lower Manhattan pizzeria and bar Adoro Lei, Mr. Banks drove Ms. Condina home to Brooklyn. On the way, they stopped at “The People’s Beach,” at Jacob Riis Park in Queens.
“You could hear the waves crashing from where we stood,” Ms. Condina said. “We were looking up at the moon, just talking. It was so spontaneous and romantic, the type of stuff you watch in movies.”
The sun was rising when they parted. And Ms. Condina, who had concerns about dating a rapper, had aired them.
“I just didn’t have the patience to be annoyed by groupies, or by not hearing from a guy when he goes on tour,” she said.
Mr. Banks set them squarely in the rearview. “I don’t give off the kind of energy that attracts girls jumping onstage,” he said. “If I’m out on the road, I go to my hotel room and watch cartoons till soundcheck. I’m a homebody.”
The next day, he invited her to a party for his sister’s graduation.
“As soon as my grandmother met her, she was like, ‘I love her,’” Mr. Banks said. “I thought, she’s got Grandma’s blessing. This is real. It’s up.”
By August, when Ms. Condina left for a land art residency across the Southwest, a sense of realness had grown for both. For months, it withstood long stretches of work in areas too remote for phone service.
“For five or eight days, I’d have no signal, and then I’d get back to having a signal and find he’d left me all these voice memos, little recordings of us on FaceTime,” she said.
But when she got back to New York in December, they drifted. Mr. Banks was commuting between New York and Los Angeles to make a record. Ms. Condina had immersed herself in preparations for a February 2020 land art exhibition.
The onset in March 2020 of the pandemic put even more distance between them. Ms. Condina was avoiding contact with anyone outside her household to protect her grandmother, whose health was fragile. (Ms. Santangelo died in 2021). That included Mr. Banks.
For almost a year, “we took a break,” she said.
The break ended Dec. 31, 2021, when she and several friends booked a room at the Standard High Line hotel in Manhattan to ring in the New Year. She and Mr. Banks had never stopped hearing about each other through a loose network of mutual friends. And he had also been trying to reach her in earnest.
That night, “he was texting me and calling me like, where are you?” she said. He missed her, and when he showed up at the Standard at her invitation, he told her so.
Within a day, “we had rekindled things,” she said. “After that, we said, this isn’t going to be just any relationship. It became serious.”
In the spring of 2022, Mr. Banks moved into the Condina family home, where they still live with her father, in Brooklyn. On Dec. 31, 2024, while they were finishing dinner at Ama Raw Bar in Manhattan’s East Village, he proposed.
The plan was to drop to one knee outside the restaurant. But a sudden downpour occasioned a Plan B. After he asked her to marry him in their booth at the restaurant, he hailed a cab to a Hudson Yards cocktail bar, where friends and family were waiting to celebrate with them. In the taxi van on the way, “there was just enough room for me to get on my knee” on the damp floor mat, he said.
Ms. Condina and Mr. Banks considered eloping last summer while on vacation in Sicily. But Ms. Condina’s memories of ducking under lace curtains to play bride as a child and her mother’s insistence on a “real wedding,” she said, changed their minds.
“We have too many loved ones in New York,” she said.
They were married on Valentine’s Day at the Liberty Warehouse in Brooklyn with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as backdrops. Their 150 guests watched as Ms. Condina, wearing head-to-toe lace, including a long-sleeved jacket over her Watters wedding gown and a cathedral veil, made her way down the aisle on her father’s arm. Mr. Banks wore a classic black tuxedo.
Ron Rodrigo, a friend previously ordained through American Marriage Ministries, officiated a short ceremony. Both read handwritten vows.
Ms. Condina told Mr. Banks she knew they were meant for each other early in the relationship, when he mentioned to a friend they had known each other in a previous life. Mr. Banks wrote a song called “Vows” for Ms. Condina. With the cadence of a musician, he read it in its entirety at the altar. The title comes from the final verse.
“I’mma hold you down,” it begins.
“I’m not with the back and forth or the run around
I just want to see you smile
Whether we at the crib or out of town
What I was looking for been found
Now we reading marriage vows.”
On This Day
When Feb. 14, 2026
Where The Liberty Warehouse, Brooklyn
Heart-Shaped At a seated dinner following the ceremony, guests chose from short ribs or miso Chilean sea bass. Lulu Cake Boutique, a favorite baker, made a tiered, heart-shaped cake as a nod to Valentine’s Day. In addition to signature cocktails, the reception featured passed shots of limoncello and what Ms. Condina called “artsy Jell-O shots” by Solid Wiggles in Brooklyn.
Limitless For a first dance, the couple chose the Italian song “Il Cielo in Una Stanza” to honor their love of Sicily and Ms. Condina’s Italian heritage. “It translates to ‘heaven’ or ‘sky in a room,’” Ms. Condina said. “She’s singing about the magical, world-apart feeling of just you and another person and the ceiling becoming limitless. We chose it because it captures the feeling of our love.”
All Night Long At an after-party at Aura 57 in Midtown, friends made toasts, listened to hip-hop and danced till dawn. “We’re kind of a late-night crowd,” Ms. Condina said.
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