Dusti bonge biography for kids

• She is considered Mississippi’s first Abstract Expressionist painter and its first Modernist artist.

Dusti Bongé, whose real name was Eunice Lyle Swetman, was the youngest of three children born to a prominent Biloxi, Mississippi, banking family.

Her final show at the Parsons gallery was in 1975, but she continued to create a very strong body of work, including some monumental oil paintings, through the next decade.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, small format watercolor paintings, many on Joss paper (sheets of bamboo or rice paper centered with a small square of gold or silver leaf) that was available at the local Asian markets, became her preferred medium.

Some of the work from this period features angular forms and paint surfaces that are etched and textured. She graduated from Blue Mountain College in North Mississippi. That was when Dusti began exploring painting as a career.

She also acquired the nickname “Dusti”. 

Dusti and Archie were married in Biloxi in 1928 and settled in New York. Dusti also showed promise as a painter and Arch encouraged her to work with him. After his death, Dusti sought solace in the studio where they had worked together and began to paint seriously.

In the video, “Dusti Bongé, the Life of an Artist,” Dusti tells the story of her entry into the art world.

Since 2001, Susan Marquez has been writing about people, places, spaces, events, music, businesses, food, and travel. Although in later years, she had an active social life, dated and had numerous proposals, Dusti never remarried.

Dusti Bongé’s prolific art career spanned more than 55 years. During this time, she met her future husband, Archie Bongé, a promising young painter from Nebraska.

The things that make life interesting.

Always an artistic child, Bonge’ attended Blue Mountain College in northeastern Mississippi before graduating from the Lyceum Arts Conservatory in Chicago. It was Archie who had encouraged Dusti's natural abilities as an artist, after she once drew him a “picture” to make up for an argument. 

Dusti Bongé is best known for her abstract work that first garnered public attention in a solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1956.

It was then she received her nickname, Dusti, from friends because they teased her about constantly washing her dusty face when she would return home through the bustling, dirty streets of the growing city. She appeared on stage and in silent films in Chicago and New York. They married in 1928. Betty Parsons gave her her first solo exhibition in April 1956.

Dusti continued to work in a similar abstract style in the 1960s, but with a darker palette.

Beginning painting in the mid-1930s, Dusti initially depicted scenes of her native Biloxi and still life compositions, in a sometimes realistic but often more modernist style.

In 1938, she began to experiment with Surrealism and worked in that style of over a decade. With spelling adjusted, the nickname stuck.

In Chicago, Dusti met and fell in love with Arch Bongé, a Nebraska “cowboy artist,” who was taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.

She was a trailblazing artist, who developed a distinctive style moving through periods of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.