Vicinal Voices

Vicinal Visions presents the works of Dusti Bongé, Ida Kohlmeyer and Dorothy Hood from the collection of Ogden Museum of Southern Art, highlighting three visionary women who helped expand the boundaries of abstraction in the American South. Though each of these Southern artists developed their own distinct visual language, their work shares a spirit of experimentation and Modernist sensibilities, refracted through individual lenses of personal experience and place.

Dusti Bongé, widely considered Mississippi’s first Modernist painter, absorbed the lessons of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism while remaining rooted in the rhythms of the Gulf South. Her canvases oscillated between dreamlike figuration and gestural abstraction, drawing inspiration from both the outer world of the Gulf Coast’s natural and built environments, as well as the inner world of dreams, visions and the psyche. Ida Kohlmeyer, working in New Orleans, moved toward non-objective and geometric abstraction early in her career. She later developed an instantly recognizable visual language of symbols, grids and calligraphic marks—creating joyous and playful compositions that seemed both orderly and free, personal and universal. Her practice distilled the influence of Mark Rothko and Hans Hofmann into a syntax that felt inseparably tied to the vibrancy of her native city. Dorothy Hood, though raised in Houston, was profoundly shaped by her decades in Mexico, where she moved in circles of poets, composers, Surrealists and the Mexican Muralists, most notably José Clemente Orozco. Her monumental canvases radiate a cosmic sensibility, merging Abstract Expressionist gesture with a metaphysical search for space, silence and the infinite.