Lesbian Road Trips and Open Freeways: Landscapes of Liberation and Mobility in Bernice Bing’s Paintings from the 1960s

In 1962, at age 27, Bernice Bing left San Francisco for Mayacamas Vineyard in Napa Valley—a pivotal move that marked the beginning of a career shaped by frequent travel across Northern California. Despite early recognition and mentorship from artists like Richard Diebenkorn and Saburo Hasegawa, Bing, a queer Chinese American woman, faced profound structural barriers in the White, male-dominated Bay Area art scene. Through her travels between rural towns and the urban center of San Francisco, Bing was exposed to diverse environments and philosophies, which offered a retreat from the exclusions she encountered in the city. Enabled by postwar infrastructural freeway expansion and automobile access, these travels fostered a period of artistic growth and relative solitude. Bing’s paintings from the 1960s reflect this psychic and geographic shift, grounded in site-specific encounters and novel experiences. This paper closely examines works such as A Lady and a Road Map (1962) to trace how Bing’s formal experimentation with abstraction, geography, and sensuality reflect the artist’s newfound liberties associated with automotive themes such as the American open road, the lesbian road trip, and women's liberation. Emphasizing the emancipatory dimensions of her mobility and the novel experiences it afforded, this paper seeks to move beyond narrow, identitarian readings of Bing’s work, instead attending to the specific localities that shaped her practice. It also illuminates the complex entanglements of privilege in the United States, where access to seemingly liberatory roadway infrastructures is conditioned by and complicit in racialized and class-based structures of imperial power.