Bringing the Art to You

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Week #30

1956 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, Drawings, 1956, Exhibition Brochure Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1956 Dusti Bongé had her first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. That same year she also had an ink drawing in the Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit featured over 200 artists, including many famous ones like Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa, and Andrew Wyeth, to name just a few.

The Whitney is dedicated to art and artists of the United States. The institution started in 1914 as the Whitney Studio, founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, to allow a venue for those artists who were doing new and innovative work not recognized by the established academies. By 1931, the Whitney was founded as a museum, and in the early 1960s it opened in the iconic Marcel Breuer building where it stayed for half a century.

As you can see on the catalog list, Dusti Bongé had a “Pen, Brush and Ink" drawing in this exhibition titled Music. During those years, in addition to her many oil paintings, Dusti produced quite a few large works on paper, many of them monochromatic works in black ink. In an (undated) handwritten letter to Betty Parsons from that time period, she wrote “Have a new ink brush, going mad drawing with it.” Perhaps this was one of those drawings. Later, her 1958 solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery featured several of her works on paper in addition to paintings.

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 continually working to maintain as complete a record as possible, and to determine the location of all of Dusti Bongé's work. If you have 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.

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You can now view some of these works on our website:

https://www.dustibonge.org/missing-works.html

Available in our store:

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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

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Our mission: to promote the artistic legacy of Dusti Bongé (1903-1993)