The Family
Oil on canvas
54 1/4 x 86 1/4 inches
1965
As published in:
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
Dusti Bonge, Art and Life: Biloxi, New Orleans, New York
As exhibited in:
Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women in the Johnson Collection, Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, 2023; The Columbus Museum, Georgia, 2024
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, 2018–2021, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
One of the first artists from Mississippi to embrace modernism, Dusti Bongé began experimenting with Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Associates in New York connected Bongé with the most progressive artists of the day and introduced her to the avant-garde philosophies and techniques that were slow to reach the Deep South. In this compelling composition, a series of irregular rectangles, each imbued with a distinctive personality, marches across the space. Bongé enlivened the surface by alternating the thick and thin application of paint and by gouging away the medium in linear strokes.