New Discoveries Around Every Corner Inside New Orleans’ Ogden Museum Of Southern Art

If you travel for art. If you go out of your way. If you are in a different museum every month and a different gallery every weekend, your eyes soon crave fresh material.

Even if you’re visiting the best museums and galleries in the world, eventually, you desire new visual experiences. You seek discoveries.

That search should take you to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans where exciting, unusual and unfamiliar work awaits around every corner.

Will Henry Stevens, Ellsworth Woodward, Clementine Hunter, Benny Andrews, John McCrady; all feature prominently in the Ogden’s permanent collection. While widely respected in art circles, fate and geography–oftentimes combined with race and gender–not the quality of their work, keep them from enjoying the household name status of their contemporaries.

Faced with the brilliance of their work and what will most likely be your unfamiliarity of it prior to visiting, you inevitably leave the Ogden contemplating the incompleteness of art history, even recent American art history, and the arbitrary, occasionally unsettling, reasons for it. Your ignorance of these too-hard-to-find artists can be excused. The same cannot be said for the decades of curators and museum directors who overlooked them.

This summer, the Ogden’s spotlight shines brightest on another artist who will probably be new to you: Dusti Bongé.

Bongé (1903-1993) lived a life dramatically against type for her era.

She was a Southern debutant who married a then-unknown western painter. After achieving success as an actress, she left New York and her career there to raise a son in her native Mississippi.

It was her husband who encouraged her to begin painting and pursue a future in it. Imagine that progressive family dynamic in pre-war America. After her husband died young, she never remarried.

She became the first artist in Mississippi to work consistently in a modern style.

Despite her residence far from the epicenter of the art world in New York, she found representation with Betty Parsons–among the handful of most powerful art dealers in 20^th century America–and her New York gallery from the mid-40s through the mid-70s.

Her association with Parsons, whose roster of clients at the same time included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg just to name a few, still left Bongé mostly forgotten by art history outside Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

The Ogden Museum and exhibition curator Bradley Sumrall hope to change that.

“The obvious reason that she was a woman at a time when the art world was very–not only male dominated, but the personas were very macho,” Sumrall said about Bongé’s relative obscurity among the leading first generation Abstract Expressionist painters. “I think that also she was so tied to place; she stayed in Mississippi and did not follow that success in New York. She was comfortable where she was.”

Sumrall says Bongé’s story exemplifies the need for a world-class museum dedicated to this work.

I think that is part of our mission at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, to not only celebrate the artists that are working now, the artists that saw fame in their lifetime that came from the South, the Cy Twomblys and Robert Rauschenbergs of the art world, but also to celebrate those people that were left out of the conversation because they stayed in the South and they didn't follow the art world in New York or LA.

The show opens with early still life paintings. They’re not bad, but foreshadow little of the fireworks to come. Bongé next experimented with Cubism before progressing to Surrealism.

“The depth of her experimentation was a revelation,” Sumrall said about his experience curating the show which follows a linear, easy to follow chronological order clearly demonstrating the distinct phases of her career.

Bongé’s Surrealist paintings are the first which tease a glimpse of genius, a genius fully on display when the exhibit highlights her Abstract Expressionism. Here, her work hits its stride.

“I think she belongs in (the story of) Abstract Expressionism firmly,” Sumrall said. “She was at the forefront there. She was in the very first iteration of Betty Parsons’ stable… being a successful artist in that early stable, she should be placed right alongside Clifford Still, Jackson Pollock.”

Her brilliance doesn’t stop with Ab Ex. The exhibit continues soaring as guests are led to a subsequent series of work based on dreams. A later abstract series, “Void,” demonstrates a true master in total command of her craft.

Paintings completed into her 80s show the sure hand and confidence of an artist with nothing more to prove.

“She never stopped being creative her entire life, whether it was acting as a child leading into painting and then that thirst for knowledge and creating that kind of life built on ideas and creativity,” Sumrall said. “That shows in her body of work, it shows in her biography, and you just kind of feel it when you when you stand among the paintings.”

Taken together, Bongé’s work represents a stunningly accomplished, diverse career, laid out magnificently by Sumrall, making her singular talent patently obvious to even novice art lovers.

Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bongé can be seen at the Ogden through September 8.

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s location in New Orleans’ emerging Warehouse Arts District across the street from the World War II Museum provides for discoveries outside its wall as well.

Base your visit at the Cambria Hotel, a 10-minute walk from the Ogden and mere steps from the neighborhood’s Julia Street art galleries, restaurants and bars. It’s also less than a mile from the French Quarter.

Enjoy a gourmet grilled cheese and craft beer across the street from the Cambria Hotel at St. James Cheese Company. Sip one of the countless, creative amaro’s–an Italian after-dinner herbal liquor–at Gianna.

No place in the world is better for cocktails than New Orleans and the Polo Club Lounge inside the Windsor Court Hotel pours a fine one. Keep an eye out for the Thomas Gainsborough painting near the check in desk.

New Orleans, you’ll find, is full of surprises.