Bernice Bing: BINGO

Artist Bernice Bing in her North Beach studio, c. 1958-1961.
© Estate of Bernice Bing. Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

Nearly 30 Years After Her Death, a Bay Area Great Gets a Towering Solo Show in New York

By Grace Edquist

September 18, 2024

The late Bay Area artist Bernice Bing was 25 years old when she had her first solo show, at San Francisco’s edgy but short-lived Batman Gallery, in 1961. Her abstract paintings were a hit; San Francisco Chronicle critic Alfred Frankenstein said Bing had a “remarkable gift for fluid line,” among other bits of praise. Not bad for a recent MFA grad. “People were somewhat surprised at my work because I hadn’t made a lot of noise at school,” Bing once reflected. “So, when I had that exhibition, people were rather taken aback by it. I liked that; I like surprises!”

Sixty-three years later, Bing is the subject of another astonishing debut: her first-ever solo show in New York. “Bernice Bing: BINGO,” on view at Berry Campbell gallery through October 12, brings together more than 30 works spanning from 1961 until 1998, the year Bing died of cancer at age 62. It’s a long-overdue moment for an artist whose ferocious paintings rank right up there with the other greats of mid-century American art.

In her lifetime, Bing had a whole lot stacked against her: She was gay, Chinese American, orphaned, abused, a woman. And she was an Abstract Expressionist living some 2,500 miles away from the center of that scene. But she persisted, plumbing art history, the lush California landscape, and her own complex history in her searing paintings.

While she was well-known in Bay Area artistic circles, wider acknowledgement of her work was limited—as was the case for so many non-white, non-male artists of that era. “She was this incredible artist who’s been hidden because people were too afraid to go there with her,” says Martha Campbell, who, along with Christine Berry, founded Berry Campbell in 2013.

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