Jen Banta

What is the Mystery? Abstraction and the path of self-enlightenment in the life and painting of Bernice Bing

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My office, perched above the SOMArts Cultural Center gallery, is a site for exchange, community, politics, laughter, and ambitious cultural production. SOMArts, one of four city-owned cultural centers, has history in every crevice. The ineffable presence of those who came before pervades the space. Stored in the rafters above my desk, for example, is a painting from 1980 by Bernice Bing titled Burney Falls, one of several that she painted of that location in Northern California, sometimes called the eighth wonder of the natural world.

Spontaneous moments arise at SOMArts, and I find myself in conversation with people who knew Bing. Her life had a catalyzing effect on a group of people who came together after her death to remember and honor her, and who remain loosely connected. Lydia Matthews writes, “Hers was a powerfully sustained yet quiet career. This kind of artist can easily fall through historical cracks if we do not diligently keep her memory alive.”
Bing has indeed largely fallen through the cracks, though in her time she was quite visible. In the 1950s she was among the first generation of postwar women artists active in California. After graduation she enjoyed a one-person exhibition at the Batman Gallery, one of several Beat galleries that appeared briefly during the late 1950s and early 1960s in San Francisco. Bing appears in the poster announcing her 1961 show, surrounded by her paintings in her studio above the Noodle Factory in North Beach, a hub of Beat activity. She received early critical acclaim in Artforum reviews by the critic James Monte in 1963 and 1964. It seemed to be the beginning of a promising career, but recognition waned substantially over the ensuing years, partly due to her difficulties in surviving financially as an artist, the time she devoted to administrative duties (including her role as the first executive director of the South of Market Cultural Center, now SOMArts), and her failing health.

What were the conditions that contributed to Bing’s marginalization? This project reframes the decades of Abstract Expressionism and the Beat movement in San Francisco, examining issues of historical erasure, gender, and the quest for identity, with the aim of expanding the art historical canon to accommodate the visionary painter Bernice Bing.