Berry Campbell is proud to present the first New York solo exhibition of Bernice Bing (1936 – 1998), a foundational figure among the Bay Area Abstract Expressionists. While she was largely underrecognized during her lifetime, Bing’s importance has recently been acknowledged on the West Coast through several museum exhibitions. As the exclusive representatives of Bing’s estate, Berry Campbell mounts a survey of work created between 1961 and 1996, bringing together seminal large-scale paintings and works on paper, many which have not been seen for decades. The exhibition is accompanied by a 72-page fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by the renowned critic and poet John Yau and a remembrance by Flo Oy Wong, cofounder of the Asian American Women Artists Association.
As an independent-minded, queer, Chinese American woman artist, Bing, affectionally known as Bingo, fell outside the norms of the art world of her time. As she wrote in 1965: “I, being a woman, Asian and lesbian in a white male system — Where do I start to recover my reality?” Growing up in Caucasian San Francisco foster homes and experiencing the residual effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act (established in 1882), Bing struggled to assimilate into American life while also seeking a connection to a Chinese cultural heritage from which she felt estranged.
In the 1960s, Bing was at the center of the Beat arts scene in San Francisco and absorbed the methods of her teachers at the California College of Arts and Crafts, including Richard Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa. She was active as a community organizer in the 1970s, playing a pioneering role in the Bay Area social justice movement. In 1980, she became the Director of the South of Market Cultural Center (now known as SOMArts) where she programmed exhibitions and events around the city’s diverse arts community. Bing endeavored to attain a knowledge of Chinese and Asian practices and methods through her studies with Hasegawa, a trip to Asia in 1984, and in a Buddhist practice late in her life. In painting, she found a language with which to explore the complexity of identity and what it means to assimilate cultures.
Bernice Bing: BINGO offers a view into the artist’s life and work from the beginnings of her career around 1961 through to her final years. Key works include Velázquez Family, 1961, exhibited in Bing’s first ever solo show at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco in the same year, a painting that has been praised as a feminist challenge to the male gaze. Mayacamas, 1963, which has not been shown for decades, reflects Bing’s first period spent in the countryside where she studied the Buddhist contemplation of nature as a way of releasing the ego. Bing’s Mayacamas landscapes are among her rarest works and depict the light and rhythm in the multi-colored rolling hills. A focal point of the exhibition is the monumental painting Burney Falls, 1980, which notably hung above her desk at the South of Market Cultural Center. The exhibition also features Bing’s Quantum 2, an installation comprising twenty-five abstract panels systematically organized in a grid formation. Bing’s Quantum series synthesizes Eastern and Western ideologies, drawing on Bing’s connection to both Abstract Expressionism and the Chinese calligraphic tradition, while exploring the relationship and balance between the individual works and the larger composition of the installation.
Bing’s due recognition has mainly occurred posthumously. In 2020, Bingo: The Life and Art of Bernice Bing was held at the Sonoma Valley Museum, and in 2022–23, Into the View: Bernice Bing was organized by the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Her archives belong to Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, and she is represented in several public collections, including the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Through Bernice Bing: BINGO, Berry Campbell continues its work of correcting the historical record by facilitating earnest reappraisals of artists whose work deserves serious critical engagement and positioning within art historical canons.
Bernice Bing: BINGO is on view at Berry Campbell from September 12 through October 12, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 12, 2024, from 6 to 8 p.m. On the occasion of the exhibition, Berry Campbell will host a special screening of The Worlds of Bernice Bing (2013), on Saturday, September 28, 2024, at 4 p.m. This documentary, created by award-winning queer immigrant Asian filmmaker, Madeleine Lim, explores the life, activism, and art of Bernice Bing.
