Bernice Bing

Velasquez Family, 1961, Crocker Museum

Among the crowd of out-there painters, poets, scene makers and scene stealers of San Francisco’s 1950s Beat era, Bernice Bing stood out for her obvious cool. She reputedly couldn’t walk down the street without being greeted. With a studio above the Old Spaghetti Factory, Bing was “a fiery presence,” according to Jay DeFeo. But unlike DeFeo and Joan Brown, Bing faded from the annals of California art. But she has come back in a blaze of color, with a 2019 retrospective at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, an exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum in 2022, and her first solo show in New York at the Berry Campbell gallery in 2024.

Bernice Bing—nicknamed Bingo—was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1936. Her mother, who died when Bing was six, worked at Forbidden City, the cabaret that inspired Flower Drum Song. Her childhood was spent in a girls’ home in Oakland, with white foster families, and with her grandmother, who encouraged Bing’s early interest in art. At the California School of Fine Arts, she was taught by Nathan Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Clyfford Still; early works show their influence. Especially important was the charismatic Saburo Hasegawa, who introduced her to Asian arts and philosophy. “I had no idea what it meant to be an Asian woman,” she later recalled. “He got me started thinking about that. I was in awe of him.”

Her identity quest was lifelong. She studied quantum physics, read Carl Jung, analyzed poetry, and spent nine months at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. As she recorded in her journal, “I, being a woman, Asian and lesbian in a white male system — Where do I start to recover my reality?”

Velasquez Family was shown in her 1961 exhibit at the Batman Gallery. The outlines of Velasquez’ Las Meninas are visible, with the activity of the painting clustered in front of a dark background, while a couple of key elements (the easel, the figure in the door) link this wild abstraction to the original. But it has the deep, rich colors, thick paint, and slashing strokes typical of works of her time and place.

Over time, Bing stayed afloat with a series of jobs, almost abandoning painting in the 1980s. She eventually worked at an organic grocery store, tended goats and painted in a dilapidated shed in the remote hamlet of Philo, 120 miles north of San Francisco. Many of her works were lost or destroyed; others were given to friends, from one of whom the Asian Art Museum acquired 24 works.