From Melancholic to Visionary: Reframing Abstraction in the Work of Bernice Bing, 1960s–Early 1970s

This paper explores Bernice Bing’s fraught and evolving relationship to Abstract Expressionism by examining her Mayacamas series (c. 1963-65) and Visionary (1971). A group of abstract landscape paintings created during her caretaker work at the Mayacamas Vineyards, the Mayacamas series reflects Bing’s training in Abstract Expressionism, yet is notable for its spectral quality. Focusing on the emergence of ghostly forms, ambiguous and fragmented bodily allusions, and unresolved psychic tensions in both her paintings and journals, I argue that the Mayacamas series demonstrates Bing’s effort to work within and against the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. In the manner of José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” they repurpose the dominant artistic language to articulate the melancholic psyche of a racialized and queer subjectivity historically excluded from its discourse. Toward the end of the decade, Bing became increasingly disillusioned with the tenets of Abstract Expressionism she had long endeavored to work through. Focusing on the semi-abstract Visionary, I briefly discuss her “Visionary” phase that emerged from this reckoning, as well as her residency at the famed psychospiritual institution Esalen. Complexly codifying her queer subjectivity, these paintings attest not only to her attempt to carve a new, personalized visual language, but also to her evolving relationship to the language of abstraction.