Vicinal Visions: Dusti Bongé, Ida Kohlmeyer & Dorothy Hood

This exhibition highlights three Southern women artists whose work expanded the boundaries of abstraction in the American South. 

While Dusti Bongé, Ida Kohlmeyer and Dorothy Hood each developed her own distinct visual language, their work shares a spirit of experimentation and Modernist sensibilities, refracted through individual lenses of personal experience and place.

Placed in conversation, the works of Bongé, Kohlmeyer and Hood resonate with the vitality of Modernist expression in the American South. These three artists, born between 1903 and 1918, each responded to the global currents of abstraction in ways that were shaped by their specific geographies—whether the salty, storm-bent landscape of the Mississippi Gulf Coast; the diverse, vibrant and historic cultural fabric of New Orleans; or the spirit of artistic optimism and endless possibility shared by both Mexico City and Houston. Together, these three women testify to the power of artists who, working outside the traditional centers of New York and Paris, expanded the horizons of Modern Art and redefined what Southern Abstraction could mean.