Dusti Bongé monochrome black grid

Dusti Bongé was the first artist from Mississippi to work in an exclusively Modernist style. That commitment is revealed in this seemingly mundane artwork. Analysis, as always, comes from Ligia M. Römer, executive director of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation in Biloxi, MS.

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Black Grid), 1960, ink on paper, 18” x 12”

In the 1960s Dusti Bongé created monochrome, often black, works on paper. These black ones were mostly done in ink.

Of these works there is a specific subset that are all variations of grids or grid-adjacent geometries. At first glance this may seem a rather uninteresting subject matter or compositional approach. However, the grid has always played an important role in art. In fact, the grid significantly contributed to a major shift in art toward modernism when it became a subject matter, as opposed to just being a tool as it had been for centuries. The grid was brought to the foreground instead of being relegated to being just a regulating framework in the background.

At the turn of the 20 century some artists like the Russian constructivists and Dutch modernists started to explore grids in one way or another as a way to reduce art to its simplest, purest form, or as a spatial construct, or even as an ideological framework. In the 1960s several artists again embraced the grid as a compositional element in minimalist and conceptual art.

Dusti never explicitly embraced either of these trends. However, it is clear that she wanted to explore the nuances of lines working together to make grid-like structures. She understood that every line drawn in a grid distilled mark making down to its essence. She played with the weight of the brush stroke, the density of the lines themselves, and the spacing between them

In this work the density of the lines becomes lighter and lighter as one moves from left to right diagonally down the grid, thus creating movement in the structure. In some cases, the broad brush strokes dissolve into multiple thin strands that echo the main grid lines. Thus, she has created a work that achieves a subtle pattern that becomes more intriguing the longer one looks at it.