DUSTI BONGÉ ART FOUNDATION
  • The DBAF
    • Overview
    • Contact/Donate/Info
    • Store
  • The Artist
    • Biography
    • Overview
  • Artwork
    • Early Work
    • Surrealism
    • Abstract Expressionism
    • Later Work
    • Missing Works
  • EXHIBITIONS
    • current & recent exhibitions
    • exhibition history
    • Events
    • News

Opening soon:
​Southern/Modern
June 17, 2023 - December 10, 2023
​Georgia Museum of Art

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“Southern/Modern”, a traveling exhibition, is the first project to survey comprehensively the rich array of paintings and works on paper created in the American South during the first half of the 20th century. Featuring more than 100 works of art drawn from public and private collections across the country, it brings together a generation’s worth of scholarship. Structured around key themes that cut across state lines it takes an inclusive view of the artists working in the region.
Organized by the Mint Museum in collaboration with the Georgia Museum of Art . Accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring essays by leading scholars, produced in collaboration with the University of North Carolina Press.

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674087/southernmodern/​

Dusti Bongé, Lyle Bongé, Paul Bongé, Joey Rice
January 28 - Extended til July 15, 2023
​Dusti Bonge Art Foundation

Celebrating the spirit of collaboration, experimentation and inspiration among artists,

The show features works created by each artist and some of their collaborations as well. It showcases how each artist pursued abstraction in photographs, paintings, works on paper, and mixed media sculptures.
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​The Dusti Bongé Art Foundation

Welcome to the official website of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation. This site offers a wide range of information on the art and life of the outstanding Modernist artist Dusti Bongé.
We hope you visit often to learn more about Dusti Bongé, whose remarkable oeuvre spanned over 55 years. We invite you to sign our e-mail list and learn about who we are and what we do. Enjoy exploring our website.
 
Dusti Bongé (1903-1993), neé Eunice Lyle Swetman, was a member of the first generation of abstract expressionist painters, the incomparable American art movement of the 20th Century. A native of Biloxi, Mississippi, Bongé showed with the groundbreaking Betty Parsons Gallery in New York from the 1940s through the 1970s in the company of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and other major players of that time. Although Dusti Bongé is recognized as the first truly modernist painter from Mississippi, only recently has her part in that revolutionary chapter of American art history been truly appreciated.
 
Globally, Abstract Expressionism has become widely admired as the most significant art movement in American art history.  Started in New York in the 1940s and 1950s by painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, the movement has earned its place in the canons of major worldwide art movements.  It was also the art form that Dusti Bongé found to be her best artistic outlet as her work evolved in the 1950s. 
She became a major player in this group of prominent artists, exhibiting alongside them and counting many of them as her friends.  Indeed, some became her close friends, such as Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos and Betty Parsons herself.
 
Parsons mounted several solo exhibitions of Bongé’s work, which were critically very well received. However, over the years Dusti Bongé’s work has not been recognized for its important contribution to Abstract Expressionism.  Thus, compared to some of her world famous AbEx friends and peers, her extensive oeuvre had not received the recognition it merits.  The DBAF has been working hard to rectify this situation and re-introduce the world to this extraordinary abstract painter.  Hence our stated mission.

The DBAF believes that given Dusti Bongé's exemplary contributions to the most important 20th Century American Art movement, she should be included in the canons of major Abstract Expressionist painters.
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We invite you to join the ever-growing group of ​Dusti Bongé admirers.

OUR MISSION:
The mission of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation is to promote the legacy of Modernist artist Dusti Bongé, and her significant contribution to 20th century Art.

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The Lion Roars, the Fiddle Plays, and There Is Dancing in the Sun, c. 1955, Oil on Masonite, 72" x 48”. Private Collection
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Invitation to Dusti Bongé Exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, 1960.

Visit us at the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation gallery in Biloxi

© 2023 Dusti Bongé Art Foundation, Inc.
For personal and/or educational use only. Text and images of any works of visual art or any other images contained on this website may not be reproduced, downloaded or modified in any form without the express written permission of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation. Nothing contained in this website shall be construed as conferring any license or right to any copyright on this website. All artwork, images, writings, and statements by Dusti Bongé are © Dusti Bongé Art Foundation, or © Paul Bongé.
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  • The DBAF
    • Overview
    • Contact/Donate/Info
    • Store
  • The Artist
    • Biography
    • Overview
  • Artwork
    • Early Work
    • Surrealism
    • Abstract Expressionism
    • Later Work
    • Missing Works
  • EXHIBITIONS
    • current & recent exhibitions
    • exhibition history
    • Events
    • News