Week #30, Biloxi Porches

Biloxi Porches, c. 1943, oil on canvas, 17 ¾” x 21 ½”". Collection of the Mississippi Museum of Art.

This week we share another wonderful, intensely colored painting by Dusti Bongé. Again, from the collection of the Mississippi Museum of Art, Biloxi Houses. is one of the other early works currently on view at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) exhibit titled Dusti Bongé: Modernist of the South.

Much like Dusti’s strolls through the Biloxi Cemetery, where she would take the time to capture the unique landscape filled with solemn memorials to the departed, she also strolled often through the much more lively and vibrant scenes all around the seafood industry sites. This included walks through the bustling workers’ camps where she had a job collecting rent.

These dynamic neighborhoods, many of them no longer extant due to the wrath of Katrina, were filed with creole cottages and similar regional, vernacular architecture. Two essential elements of these styles were the covered porch, and lots of windows & doors to let the air flow through the house. And both of these in turn also provided lots of shady areas to hang out and an active social stage, enlivened by the ethnic diversity of people who lived there.

Interestingly enough, Dusti (almost) never included people in her numerous Biloxi cityscapes. But she did do so in this painting and as such this work is just fascinating. Stylistically, it clearly features Dusti’s unique cubist, brightly colored, geometric approach to capturing her surroundings. But the introduction of the human figures brings something new to the scene.

In this painting the figures are mostly lingering in the shade behind open doors and windows, and do not take center stage. However, their presence adds a distinct, dreamlike, almost haunting mood to the vibrant scene. As such this painting offers a very interesting cross-over of Dusti’s angular, unpopulated cityscapes with her flowing, enigmatic, surrealist people.