Bringing the Art to You Week #22 Exhibition Poster for The Art of Dusti Bongé: A Retrospective at Walter Anderson Museum of Art , 1995, paper poster, 17” x 11”. In 1995, the year the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation (DBAF) was founded, there was a retrospective exhibit of Dusti Bongé’s work at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) in Ocean Springs, MS, the neighboring town to Biloxi. The Museum had opened its doors just a few years earlier in 1991. The poster featured a late work by Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Black Rectangle and Purple Circle) , 1985, watercolor on paper, 8 1/2” x 5”, from the Paul Bongé Collection. This small painting has a certain minimalist quality in its use of color and composition: a field of orange with a watery, purply black circle, a black rectangle and three black dots. The rectangle mostly overlaps the circle, and the dots are contained within both. The image of the work on the poster is actually to scale, showing the graphic impact of its simple composition. During that year Dusti produced well over 150 small watercolor paintings, all together presenting an astounding array of variations on a compositional theme of lines, curves, waves, rectangles, and circles. It somehow seems fitting that Dusti’s first retrospective was at WAMA. Dusti and her husband Archie were good friends with the naturalist painter Walter Anderson. Archie had met Walter while they were both studying art on the East Coast at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia and at the Art Students League in New York during the mid to late 1920s. Walter later served as the best man at the wedding in 1928 in Dusti’s hometown of Biloxi. At the time Walter had just moved back to Ocean Springs, to join the rest of his family and pursue his career. A few years later Dusti and Archie would also move back to the coast. Have you seen this work? Do you or someone you know have this work in their collection? If so, we would love to hear from you. We are continuously working to maintain as complete a record as possible, and to determine the location of all of Dusti Bongé's work. If you have any information on this or other works, you can contact us at
[email protected] We appreciate receiving any referrals to the existence and whereabouts of artworks by Dusti Bongé. Thank you. Available in our store: The definitive volume on artist Dusti Bongé, by J. Richard Gruber Dusti Bongé, Art and Life: Biloxi, New Orleans, New York Hard bound, 12” x 9”, 350 pages, over 500 color and b&w illustrations Limited edition lithographs of two original Dusti Bongé drawings. Shrimp Boats & Factories, Back Bay Biloxi I and Shrimp Boats & Factories, Back Bay Biloxi II 12” x 16” drawing, 15” x 22” paper size https://www.dustibonge.org/store.html support us Our mission: to promote the artistic legacy of Dusti Bongé (1903-1993)
