Jennifer Banta - California College of the Arts

Jennifer Banta
The Painting in the Rafters: Refiguring
Abstract Expressionist Bernice Bing
What is the mystery? The mystery is the work in process. Visually, I sense a
great order of things and attempt to transpose this mystery into a picture. I
used to look for meaningful order in life, now I am accepting things as IS. That
nothing is certain, and in my imagery is ever-changing. We are at an epoch of a
brave new world, and my hope is that our views will change about how we see
our world, not to stay with the things familiar, but to reach out for the unknown.
—Bernice Bing, Artist Statement for the Triton Museum Exhibition, 10/18/92

Bernice Bing, Burney Falls. 1980. Oil on Canvas, 96 x 77 3 ⁄4". SomArts Cultural Center,
San Francisco.
My office with the Asian Pacific Islander
Cultural Center, perched above the SomArts
Gallery, is a site for exchange, community,
politics, laughter, and ambitious cultural production. SomArts,
one of four city-owned cultural centers, has history in every
crevice. The ineffable presence of those who came before pervades
this space. Stored beneath the rafters above my desk, for
example, was a 1980 painting by the first Executive Director of
SomArts—painter Bernice Bing. Burney Falls was one of several
canvases that she painted of this location in Northern California,
sometimes called the eighth wonder of the natural world.
I was told that Bing’s painting had been haphazardly
propped up in the hallway until it was recognized and rescued
to higher ground. The fact that Bing’s painting was stored in
such a manner would seem to be at worst a high art crime, at
best sheer neglect. I could not reconcile this lack of respect, yet
it seemed oddly emblematic of the treasure trove that is
SomArts, where high and low art comingle.
The specter of invisibility has become the conduit for considering
how a desire to create a visual archive of Bernice Bing’s
life, art, and legacy has as much to do with excavating and pre-
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serving the material of her artwork as with her lived experience.
I needed to understand the importance of the spiritual path
Bing followed and the meditation practice that gave her focus
and confidence as well as her search for her diasporic community
in order to begin to navigate this in-between space. By
approaching this task experientially, through listening to stories,
looking at her paintings, and reading her journals, I too
have found myself in the mystery of constant discovery. I am
drawn to this state of absence, and I find that presence is
returned by how I negotiate this space. I believe that art provides
a medium for accessing this space of forgotten stories—
making visible the invisible. As if the catalyst for my intent had
been far closer than I could have realized, with Burney Falls
hanging above my head every day, Bernice Bing’s oeuvre needed
to be, in effect, dusted off and brought to light.
What exactly were the conditions that contributed to Bing’s
marginalization? It is perhaps all too familiar an occurrence
that a lesbian artist of color was filtered out of art history. If I
accept this reality as a given, then I must also go beyond this
banal fact and tease out the details of her story. There are many
facets of Bing’s identity—all of which beckon to be further
explored, including the period of Beat history that contains
such fissures and forgotten stories. Bing had access to the art
world as an integral player.1 Her marginalization occurred with
the passage of time.
Perhaps the materialistic aspect of preserving Bing’s art is
antithetical to the fact that her work was rooted in process and
the negotiation of mystery. On the relation between art and
Buddhist spirituality, Bing stated, “I haven’t learned to let go of
art. The highest form of art is a vehicle, a mantra. I am burdened
by the materialistic aspect of producing art.”2 I am intrigued by
the complex and dynamic relations between Bing’s life and
work. At present there is little written about Bernice Bing, save
for the work begun by Moira Roth and the memorial essay written
by Lydia Matthews, both archived on the Queer Cultural
Center’s website by Rudy Lemcke. Despite this paucity of textual
material, I find myself in the privileged position of being surrounded
by people who knew and loved her.
Spontaneous moments arise at SomArts where I find myself
in conversation with people who knew Bernice Bing. Bing’s life
had a catalyzing effect on a group of people who came together
after her death to remember and honor her life, and who
remain connected. In Quantum Bingo, the essay memorializing
Bing after her death, Lydia Matthews writes, “[hers] was a powerfully
sustained yet quiet career. This kind of artist can easily
fall through historical cracks if we do not diligently keep her
memory alive.”3 Indeed, Bing has now largely fallen through the
cracks, though in her lifetime she was quite visible. During the
1950s, Bing was among the first generation of post-war women
artists in California, and after her graduation, Bing enjoyed a
one-person exhibition at the Batman Gallery, one of several
Beat galleries that appeared briefly during the late ’50s and early
’60s in San Francisco. Bing appears in the poster announcing
her 1961 show, surrounded by her paintings in her studio above
the Noodle Factory in North Beach, the seat of Beat activity.
Bing received early critical acclaim for her work with a 1963 and
1964 Artforum review by critic James Monte. In many ways, this
period marked the beginning of a promising career. However,
this level of recognition waned substantially over the ensuing
years, often due to her difficulties in surviving financially as an
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artist, time devoted, at least in part, to administrative duties
(such as her role as the first Executive Director of SomArts),
and her failing health.
The art community in the San Francisco Bay area experienced
a surge of creative energy after World War II, and the city
was the site of interchanges between abstract painters, Beat
poets, jazz musicians, the West and East coasts, as well as artistic
and spiritual contacts with Asia.4 This zenith of creativity
encompassed a Beat sensibility that included collaboration, collectivity,
and many forms of artistic expression. What was it like
to come of age artistically during these times? In many ways,
this post-war period represented a liminal stage, and Bing was
an integral player in this moment.
San Francisco’s Bohemian history is rich and has been lovingly
documented in numerous publications, yet these tales are
only part of the story. In the Bohemian milieu, the masculine
world of the literati and the male subjectivity of Abstract
Expressionism dominated. Of course, women were present and
not just as wives and stunning guests at parties and openings,
but as business partners and artists. Rebecca Solnit has written
extensively about Beat painting as concurrent with that of the
literati’s activities during this period in the catalog accompanying
the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, Beat
Culture and the New America, 1950–1965.5 She explicates that
though the historical focus has always been on the literati’s activities
in North Beach, the strong presence of painters and jazz
musicians in the Western Addition promoted significant artistic
exchange. The two prominent women in this group that Solnit
writes about were close friends of Bing’s: Jay De Feo (married to
Wally Hendrick) and Joan Brown (married to Manuel Neri).
Charles Snyder, Batman Gallery Poster. 1961. Collection of Lenore Chinn.
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Romantic alliances that were formed within this bohemian
haven were an integral part of the movement and formed a
nexus of lovers, partners, and roommates. A woman’s success
and visibility as an artist was no doubt heightened by the partnerships
she formed with successful men, and in many ways
created a conflation of roles previously prescribed to women in
bohemia’s history, such as the unsettled distinction between
woman as muse and woman as artist. This idea was perhaps
most clearly defined within Surrealism by André Breton, who
attributed the female muse with child-like qualities that he saw
as closer to the unconscious than men were.6 Although De Feo
and Brown were talented artists in their own right, I think it is
important to question why they are written about and not
Bernice Bing, the lesbian artist. Their marriages, as far as history
is concerned, ensure that they are remembered by association.
Bernice Bing was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in
1936. Her mother and aunt worked as hat girls and dancers in
Chinatown’s infamous Forbidden City, a Chinese-themed
cabaret frequented by military personnel. For Bernice’s mother
to choose to step out of the tightly prescribed domestic female
roles was to invite a certain degree of ostracism from the community.
She did it anyway; it was a job, and the Depression was
in full force. Bing’s aunt Lonnie was also drawn by the allure of
late nights, glamorous costumes, and people from outside
Chinatown;7 it is unclear whether this was the case for Bing’s
mother. However, I like to think that this act became a legacy
for Bing who was continually drawn to the avant-garde and
spent her life deeply immersed in a variety of different worlds
while maintaining separate identities.
Bing’s mother died when she was a young girl. Though her
Unknown Photographer. Forbidden City Dressing Room. n.d. Collection of Frances
Chun Kan.
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father, grandmother, and aunt were alive, both she and her
younger sister Lolita spent their childhoods shuttled between
Caucasian foster homes with only sporadic contact with their
Asian relatives and infrequent visits to Chinatown. Bing was not
an orphan since she had next of kin, but was orphaned nonetheless
from her primary family. In her memories of her childhood,
Bing emphasizes the cultural differences she experienced:
My grandmother represented China, the old country, bringing
over her feelings of anger and subservience, but her
strength, too. She was a woman who had bound feet, bound
at the age of five. I didn’t really know my mother but, of
course she was my grandmother’s child . . . my mother had an
ambitious life as a young woman but she was never able to
fulfill herself completely because she died at the young age of
twenty-three. For me there was the difficulty of being an
Asian American child going to a basically very middle class
white school, and trying to assimilate both of these cultures.8
The early rupture in her life caused by her mother’s death
disconnected her from the key sources of cultural transmission.
Gone were the superstitions, the stories, the language, and the
food that all serve as conduits for transferring her Chinese culture
from the elders in her family. Though she was raised in foster
homes, she had relatives who exposed her to her Chinese
heritage through the occasional visits, and this was enough to
spark an interest which she pursued as a young woman through
her studies and for the rest of her life.
Her memories of Chinatown (the sights, smells, colors, and
sounds) were only a memory, not something that was directly
cultivated growing up. How does such an influence grow? In the
absence of an environment that nurtures a sensibility, is there
information in the space of memory that provides an intuitive
map to navigate the world?
At that time I knew almost nothing about Eastern art or
thought. I was totally naive about my own cultural heritage.
I was living in and reacting to parallel worlds—one, the
rational, conscious world of the West; the other, the intuitive,
unconscious world of the East. This duality caused me to
explore the differences and samenesses in art forms.9
Is Bing strategically toying with stereotypical notions of
East/West dualism here? When she refers to the West as “conscious”
and the East as “unconscious,” I am inclined to think
this construct refers tacitly to the organizing principal of interconnectedness
that is understood as part of a dualistic whole. If
I understand that in every cliché there is an element of truth,
then it compels me to go beyond the face-value of her statement.
It also has to be acknowledged that, given she was born,
raised, and educated in the United States, her context, first and
foremost, was a hybrid of the experiential, the learned, and the
intuitive, given her artistic sensibilities.
Bing’s statement can also be understood as an admission of
her own naiveté about her cultural heritage. In fact, Bing later
turned to a Japanese mentor, Sabro Hasegawa, who inspired her
with a context to begin thinking about her heritage. In her
words, “I had no idea what it meant to be an Asian woman and
he got me started thinking about that. I was in awe of him.”10
This reveals a complex process that included all sorts of intercultural
knowledge. Bing’s lack of experience and innocence in
this regard, along with her hunger for knowledge about her her-
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itage, would have included impressions gleaned from the dominant
culture at the time. Clearly, this process was a life-long
endeavor of absorbing information and discovering self-truths.
Gifted with a facility for drawing at a young age, art became
the means by which she navigated the two worlds in which she
lived: the memory of the brief exposure to her Chinese culture
in the first years of her life, and the Western context in which
she was raised. Nona Mock Wyman, in her memoir about growing
up in the same orphanage as Bing, titled Chopstick
Childhood In A Town of Silver Spoons: Orphaned at the Ming
Quong Home, recalls the nuns who washed Bing’s mouth out
with soap as punishment for her smart and feisty tongue.11
Raised in an orphanage, Bing was not a dutiful Chinese daughter
curtailed by the family structure. The story Wyman tells is
emblematic of Bing’s angry rebellion and unwillingness to conform.
This spirit would follow her throughout her life and find
its outlet in her paintings. Early in her student career, Bing was
drawn to teachers that could inform her about painting, calligraphy,
abstraction, and Zen. In other words, her early facility for
drawing became the means by which she also was able to access
and learn about her heritage.
Bing was also deeply influenced by her studies in
Abstraction with Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliviera. In
her book, Abstract Expressionism, Other Politics, Anne Gibson
points out that Abstract Expressionism (a style whose definition
was intimately related to the identity of the artist), while being
promulgated as a universal story, has been told as a triumph of
the outsider. Abstract Expressionism represented a rebellious
movement born of the post-war period in America. This narrative,
based on the trials of a privileged group of white, heterosex-
ual bohemians and intellectuals, and celebrated by critics such as
Clement Greenberg, reflects the story of Abstract Expressionism
as it has been written into the art historical canon.
Artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning
were enamored with the idea of a pure process related to selfdiscovery
through painting. The time of Abstract
Expressionism was also the era of New Criticism in which political
affiliations were suppressed along with one’s biography. As
a result, Gibson contends, Abstract Expressionism emerged as
the “work of artists of one gender, one color, and one sexual
preference . . . while critics also insisted that their judgments
were made without reference to the artist’s identities.”12
Abstract Expressionism claimed the mantle of marginality and
appropriated aesthetic strategies (such as masking, maternalism,
and social invisibility) that paralleled experiences more
familiar to blacks, women, gays, and lesbians and was certainly
resonant to Asians experiencing bitter and protracted prejudice
in San Francisco during this time in American history.13 In particular,
from the turn of the twentieth century, until its repeal in
1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was a national system formed
specifically for regulating Asian immigration, a system that
invoked fear and suspicion of Asian Americans in the larger
community.14
Clement Greenberg and some of the influential critics that
followed him all practiced this kind of New Critical/Death of
the Author interpretation that actually perpetuated the power
and privilege of the individual artist within a space of critical
denial. How does one understand this notion of the self? In this
context, an understanding must first address the construct that
in many ways actively appropriated styles and tropes from other
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Bernice Bing, Burney Falls. 1965. Watercolor on paper, 24 x 32". Collection of
the artist.
traditions while positioning Abstract Expressionism, in
Greenberg’s words, as an “art that lies almost entirely within
Western tradition.”15 Nothing is pure; what is authentic is
entirely subjective to the individual and, perhaps, takes a lifetime
for that individual to discover.
Bing’s understanding of the East came largely from her
own desire to pursue this knowledge as a young woman, namely
through her studies with Sabro Haesgawa at the California
School of Fine Arts who introduced her to Zen, the writings of
Lao Tzu, and Chinese painting. Based on Bing’s own biography,
the historical references Bing makes to calligraphy, philosophy,
and ancient Chinese Art in her work drew from her experience.
Her search represented an excavation of her roots and was a
reflection of her unfolding identity. At the same time, it represented
a confluence of different styles and cultures.
In 1997, the year before she died, her painting, Burney Falls
(1965), was included in Asian Traditions / Modern Expressions:
Asian American Artists and Abstraction 1945–1970, a traveling
exhibition organized by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art
Museum at Rutgers University. Burney Falls (1965) closely references
the one-stroke approach of traditional Chinese ink
landscape painting, rendered in washed-out blues, browns, and
greens. It is also deeply rooted in the natural scenery of
Northern California from which it takes its name and the
California Abstract Expressionism that Bing studied.
During the period of Abstract Expressionism’s development,
a significant number of Asian American artists comprised
a largely unnoticed group of abstractionists, according to
the exhibition curator, Jeffrey Wechsler. He proposes that this
art, “centered in nature and meditative rather than assertive in
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spirit, has roots in a fundamentally Asian esthetic.”16 Wechsler
further suggests that the signature features of Abstract
Expressionism (gestural brushwork, a restricted palette) had
time-honored Asian precedents.17 Wechsler understands Bing’s
work in the context of geography/biography and the historical
traditions that influence her work. This context is provocative
given that Abstract Expressionism, at its advent, was promoted
by critics such as Clement Greenberg as a purely American Art
form. Wechsler proposes a much more fluid re-framing of this
moment based on a confluence of different traditions, coincidences,
and influences rather than a spontaneous generation on
American soil.
Art Historian Margo Machida asserts that the framing of
issues “through an Asian American lens continues to be widely
regarded as parochial and self-marginalizing.” At the same time,
“there is nothing inherently restrictive, essentialist or balkanizing
about concepts like difference and identity.” In fact, essentialism
further collapses the scope of inquiry rather than inviting further
investigation and imagination.18 Machida maintains that reproducing
Asian American visual art without new means of interpretation
and contextualization is problematic. As the world
becomes an increasingly hybrid, transnational environment,
the issues of meaning and cultural translation have to move
beyond the rhetoric of race and ethnicity. In this premise, there
is a provocative question concerning intercultural knowledge. If
it can be said that the discourse has evolved beyond mere representation
as a means to counterweight stereotypes, then it can
also be said that anybody’s biography contains complex and disparate
elements. Bing’s biography complicates and adds depth
to her art because she was actively engaged in an ongoing
process of examination. Not everyone elects to do this, and it
takes a certain degree of courage to look within in this manner.
In 1958 Bing transferred from the California College of
Arts and Crafts, where she had studied advertising, to the
California School of Fine Arts to pursue a degree in painting.
She earned a BFA with honors and went on to graduate as part
of the first MFA class in 1961.19 Bernice Bing, or Bingo as she
was affectionately called since childhood, was part of a Bay Area
art scene that included Joan Brown, Bill Wiley, Robert Hudson,
Leo Vallidor, and Cornelia Schulz—colleagues in her 1961 MFA
class at the California School of Fine Arts.
After her graduation, she enjoyed a one-person exhibition
at the Batman Gallery. The Batman Gallery was so called due to
the influence of poet Michael McClure (who, when asked about
the origin of the name, quipped, “You know, battling the forces
of evil.”) and the “blackness” that was artist Bruce Connor’s creation:
black floor, black ceilings, the complete opposite of what
you would see in most galleries with their stark white walls.20
This alternative site for artists and intellectuals was still a decidedly
male-authored environment. William Jahrmarkt financed
the Batman Gallery, and McClure and Connor were instrumental
is its design and concept.21
Alfred Frankenstein reviewed Bing’s solo show at the
Batman in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Bing . . . has a remarkable
gift for fluid line . . . carried to the verge of abstraction in
some extremely good small drawings. Her paintings are huge
and are most remarkable for the majestic sternness of their
blacks and reds . . .”22 The artists who inspired Bing (de
Kooning, Kline, Motherwell, Still23) favored monumentally
scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psy-
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ches.24 Bing also favored huge works that were as bold a statement
as her male counterparts. It could be surmised that she
was able to garner a solo show at the Batman because of the
scale of her works, at a time when a one-woman show was rare.
Bing’s work was informed by this confident masculine energy,
while at the same time she was unassuming. According to Bing,
the Batman show was “surprising” to her contemporaries since
she did not make a lot of noise at school.25
In the poster announcing the 1961 show, there is a degree
of brazen, almost defiant, authorship in this tableau, as she sits
in a rocking chair, looking boldly at her audience. Bing creates
a diptych with the arrangement of the paintings in the poster
that moves us from one chapter of art history to the next. She
places her physical body within the field, in a triangulation of
art history. To her right, her 1960 painting of Las Meninas
(based on the famous 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the
painter of King Phillip IV) represents Western figurative painting,
and to her left, is an unidentified abstract study. The bold
horizontal lines on the left connect the scenes and suggest a
continuation. As we look at her and her paintings, she also
looks at us; we have entered the sanctified space of her studio.
In this moment, we have happened upon Bing, who seems to
radiate a quiet sovereignty.
It was typical of art education at the time to have students
recreate paintings by the masters of art history, just as they had
done for hundreds of years. Bing painted Las Meninas in 1960
when she was still at the California School of Fine Arts.
Velázquez’s Las Meninas shows a large room in the Madrid
palace of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures,
most identifiable from the Spanish court. Just behind the fig-
ures, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas while
looking outwards at the viewer.26 In Bing’s Las Meninas, the
focal point of the scene is arranged around the Infanta
Margarita. The depiction of the painter in the left of the canvas
is abstracted to the background, though the canvas on which he
is working predominately frames the scene. The presence of the
Infanta highlights the female looking out of the painting at the
viewer. By recreating this painting, Bing is also aligning herself
with the master who painted the scene.
The scene staged by Bing in the poster for her exhibit at the
Batman Gallery mimics, in certain ways, Velázquez’s famous
painting. Velázquez placed himself to the side of the painting on
which he is working, and, significantly, Bing is framed by several
large paintings in her own studio. Both artists identify as
painters and associate themselves within the represented scene.
Though Bing is not actively working on her paintings in the
same way as Velázquez, the scene is staged at the site of her production,
within her studio, and her paintings serve as her
entourage. Her gaze, like Velázquez, signals an awareness of the
viewer.
Michel Foucault’s study of Velázquez’s Las Meninas focused
on the artwork itself as though it were before him, describing in
minute detail what he saw.27 Foucault conceptualizes the significance
of this painting as a “self-reflexive meditation on the
nature of representation” which signals a paradigmatic shift in
Western culture regarding representation.28 Foucault writes,
“we are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and
made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see
him.”29 Through Foucault’s act of observing and describing the
painting, he reveals a reciprocity of looking that complicates the
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Bernice Bing, Las Meninas. 1960. Oil on Canvas, 6 x 6'. Private collection (opposite
top). Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas,1656. Oil on canvas. 10'5" x 9'1". Museo del
Prado, Madrid (opposite bottom).
relationship between those who are represented and those who
look. In effect, there is a degree of uncertainty in visual representation.
Bing suggests a shift in the field of abstraction that is
dependent on the viewer’s interpretation. Here Bing shows in
visual terms the thesis that Foucault later elucidates with language.
Bing’s choice is oddly prescient as Foucault’s study of Las
Meninas would not be written for another six years.
The photographer Charles Snyder captured Bing during
the late fifties in several iconic shots in her studio, including the
one used for the Batman Gallery poster. In a second photograph,
the scene is similarly framed as the one for the poster,
except that here Bing is in the foreground, lying down on the
floor, her sweatshirt and clam-diggers spattered with paint, her
chin resting in her hand. Her gaze fully engages the viewer and
the photographer. In the background, the rocking chair is
framed by the two paintings but has been turned to face the
other way. The informal air to this scene reinforces that the studio
is where she is most at home.
In another image by photographer Grover Sales, Bing is
captured as if in contemplation of her painting that fills the
background of the frame. Here, in the midst of her reverie, she
looks out at the viewer who has entered her space. Bing is wear-
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Charles Snyder, Bingo late 50’s. n.d. Collection of the artist (below).
Grover Sales, Bernice Bing, n.d. Collection of the artist (opposite).
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ing a white oxford with the sleeves rolled up, her hair pulled
loosely back, and her trademark red lips captured in black and
white. Her hand holds a lit cigarette; the tendrils of smoke
become part of the field of abstraction in her painting. There is
something seductively voyeuristic about these shots, and I can’t
help but describe her presence in these glamorous and feminine
terms. I would venture to assert that, here, Bing assumes “the
mask of femininity” as she poses within her studio. According
to the analysis of Joan Rivière, in her essay, “Womanliness as
Masquerade,” “womanliness therefore could be assumed and
worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity
[read power and authority] and to revert the reprisals expected
if [the women] was found to possess it.”30 There is a symbiotic
relationship between Bing and the paint that reveals an intimate
and carefully crafted look at the artist.
The Sales photograph presents one version of Bing’s “self,”
embodying both her authority as an artist and her feminine
presence. The similarities between the photograph of Bing in
the white oxford and the photo that appears on the Batman
Gallery poster are as striking as the marked differences, and I
can only surmise why one and not the other, in the end, was
chosen for the poster. Ultimately, by reframing and developing
the shadow presence of the Batman Gallery and by extension,
the times around Abstract Expressionism and the Beat movement
in San Francisco, the whole picture comes into focus. The
Batman Gallery poster is a piece of ephemera that functions as
one of the few remaining testimonials to this place and time.
Reading the poster provides clues to the context of history,
gender, and Bing’s concurrent quest for identity that make clear
the need to expand the art historical canon to acknowledge the
key role of this visionary painter. The poster demonstrates that
Bing was present and that she was an integral player in Beat
History. At the tail end of the fifties, a time dominated by the
masculine presence in the arts, Bing chose to identify in bold
and unmistakable terms that she was a painter, while positioning
herself squarely within the trajectory of art history.
Notes
1 In 1960, Bing accompanies Joan Brown a close friend at this time, to New
York, for Brown's first one-person show at the Staempfli Gallery. On meeting
Marcel Duchamp at a party, Bing states, “that was my most thrilling
experience in New York.” Moira Roth, “A Narrative Chronology,” in Moira
Roth & Diane Tani, eds. Bernice Bing, (Berkeley, CA: Visibility Press, 1991).
2 Bernice Bing, Video Interview with Moira Roth, 1989.
3 Lydia Matthews, “Quantum Bingo,” (San Francisco: SomArts Gallery,
Retrospective Exhibition, 1999).
4 Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism
(Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 1996), 5–6.
5 Rebecca Solnit, “Heretical Constellations: Notes on California, 1946-1961,”
Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965, (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1995), 69.
6 Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood, Realism, Rationalism,
Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, (London: Open University, 1993), 237.
7 Lenore Chinn, in conversation with the author, (July 3, 2008).
8 Moira Roth, “A Narrative Chronology,” in Moira Roth & Diane Tani, eds.
Bernice Bing, (Berkeley, CA: Visibility Press, 1991), 22–23.
9 Asian American Women Artists Association, Of Our Own Voice, (Berkeley,
CA: AAWAA, 1998), 13.
10 Moira Roth, “A Narrative Chronology,” in Moira Roth & Diane Tani, eds.
Bernice Bing, (Berkeley, CA: Visibility Press, 1991). 22–23.
11 Nona Mock Wyman, Chopstick Childhood In A Town of Silver Spoons:
Orphaned at the Ming Quong Home (Walnut Creek, CA: MQ Press, 1999),
12 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1999), 59.
13 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, (Connecticut:
Yale University Press, 1999).
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14 Life on Angel Island, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation,
2007–2008 http://www.aiisf.org/index.php/history/life-on-angel-island
15 Ellen G. Landau, ed. Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 207.
16 Jeffery Wechsler, ed. Asian Traditions/Modern Expression: Asian American
Artists and Abstraction, 1940–1970, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art
Museum. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997.)
17 Ibid.
18 Elaine H Kim, Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota, eds. Fresh Talk, Daring
Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003). xi–xiii.
19 Edited by Moira Roth & Diane Tani, Bernice Bing, (Berkeley, CA: Visibility
Press, 1991).
20 Jack Foley, “O her blackness sparkles!” in The Beat Generation: Galleries and
Beyond, (Davis, CA: John Natsoulas Press. 1996), 163.
21 Jack Foley, 164.
22 Alfred Frankenstein as quoted in Moira Roth, “A Narrative Chronology” in
Bernice Bing. 26.
23 Bernice Bing, Artist’s Statement. Completing the Circle, (San Francisco:
Southern Exposure Gallery, 1990).
24 Paul Stella. “Abstract Expressionism”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm.
25 Ibid.
26 Madlyn Millner Kahr. “Velazquez and Las Meninas”. The Art Bulletin,
Vol.57, No. 2, June 1975. 225.
27 Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (London: Routledge. 2002), 3–18.
28 Yvette Greslé, “Foucault’s Las Meninas and art-historical methods,” Journal
of Literary Studies, Volume 22, Issue 3 & 4 (London, England: Routledge
Press, December 2006): 211–228.
29 Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” 5.
30 Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” first published in International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1929): 303–313; reprinted in The Inner World of
Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920–1958 (London: Karnac Books, 1991),
90–101.
40 Sightlines 2009