Ignored in Life, Bernice Bing Is Discovered as Museums Rewrite History
nytimes.comSAN FRANCISCO — She was an Asian American woman, a lesbian and a community activist. Bernice Bing, whose intense abstract expressionist paintings fused Eastern and Western techniques, had a lot going against her in the eyes of museum curators.
For decades, she and her peers were almost invisible. Nearly a quarter century after her death in 1998, Bing is being celebrated by the Asian Art Museum, which, like other museums in her lifetime, excluded most Asian Americans artists.
The exhibition “Into View: Bernice Bing” is showing her paintings, drawings and journal excerpts from the late ’50s to the mid-90s in a small, powerful exhibition signifying an ongoing major correctional shift by the institution. “This demonstrates the museum’s investment in underrecognized Asian American artists,” said Abby Chen, who in 2018 was appointed the museum’s first head of the department for contemporary art. Chen, who is Asian American, is the curator of the Bing exhibition, which is on view through May 2023.
Not until 2014, 48 years after its founding, did the Asian Art Museum begin solo exhibitions by Asian American artists. They were sometimes included in group shows, “but not widely,” said Zac Rose, a museum spokesman.
