Billy Al Bengston

Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City, KS; d. 2022, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist perhaps best known for his radical engagement with the aesthetics of Californian “Kustom Kar” and motorcycle culture of the late 1950s. Working in both two-and three-dimensional modes, Bengston’s psychedelically colorful works feature mandala-like, radiating compositions with symbol-like imagery including chevrons and iris flowers. Bengston often used the industrial tools and techniques honed by custom car makers, including spray paint and lacquer application on sheets of aluminum.

Billy Al Bengston attended Los Angeles City College (1953-55) before transferring to California College of Arts & Crafts (San Francisco, CA) in the fall of 1955, where he studied with Richard Diebenkorn and Sabro Hasegawa. He transferred to Otis Art Institute (Los Angeles) in the fall of 1956, studying ceramics with Peter Voulkos, alongside such contemporaries as Ken Price, through spring 1957. Billy Al Bengston’s work resides in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions in the United States and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Yale University Art Museum (New Haven, CT), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Contemporary Art Museum (Houston, TX), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France). Bengston was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1967, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1975, and was a Fellow at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1968, 1982, and 1987.