Dusti Bongé in her studio, 1957. Courtesy Bongé Family Archives

Dusti Bongé

Painting on the easel in Dusti Bongé's studio, c. 1939. Courtesy Bongé Family Archive.

Untitled (Surrealist Composition with Nuns), 1939, oil on canvas, 18" x 22".

Dusti Bongé (1903-1993), neé Eunice Lyle Swetman, was a Modernist painter who lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, and worked from the 1930s through the early 1990s.  She is considered Mississippi's first Abstract Expressionist painter and its first Modernist artist. Dusti Bongé had a prolific artistic career, initially working in a modern style influenced by Cubism, which evolved into her experimentations with Surrealism and culminated in her Abstract Expressionist work by the 1950s.

Dusti Bongé began her professional painting career in the mid-1930s.

Initially, Dusti Bongé depicted scenes of her native Biloxi. These included scenes at the Back Bay of Biloxi depicting seafood factories, shrimp boats, and fishing camps, as well as other quintessentially local scenes. She also worked on still life compositions and created her fair share of self portraits 

She also started experimenting with Surrealism and eventually worked in that style for over a decade.  Throughout the early 1950s, her Surrealist style continued to evolve. Eventually her work became totally abstract.
 
By 1955 she had embraced the bold, gestural, expressionist painting style of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, it became the artistic style in which she found her greatest satisfaction. She experimented with different color palettes, three-dimensional paintings, spray paint, and fiberglass. 
Dusti continued to create a very strong body of abstract work, including some monumental oil paintings, as well as small abstract watercolors.

She painted her last work in 1991.

I love color, I love color everywhere. I love dull colors, I love gray colors - they don't have to be bright

Dusti Bongé