I opened Chrome and googled Bernice Bing. There were links to the documentary, but there were also links to the Queer Cultural Center, which had hosted a retrospective of her work in 1999, the year after she died. Her bio was sparse, but dramatic. She had been born in San Francisco in 1936 but lost both her parents as a child, and was raised by foster families. She’d gone to art school here and started exhibiting paintings in the 1950s at the height of the Beat era. She had been out as a lesbian and accepted by the art community, but the bio didn’t mention her having a surviving partner.

The Queer Cultural Center website included small photos of her paintings; the images were so tiny on my phone I pulled out my laptop so I could enlarge them. Bernice Bing used giant sweeps of color in some; in others she painted with strokes that looked like Chinese calligraphy. I lingered on one painting in particular. The top third looked like water with a mountain emerging from it; the bottom two-thirds was dark, with a swirling mass of blue and white on the right. I wanted to know what the swirling mass of color meant to Bernice. I studied her photo in the documentary poster, but she eluded me.

I took my computer with me into the kitchen, where Joan was at the table drinking coffee and reading the Sunday Chronicle. I set my laptop down beside the discarded Arts section.

“Good morning,” she said. “You slept in. How was yesterday?”

“It was interesting,” I said, taking out milk and cereal.

“Is that the word you use when you don’t really enjoy something?”

I could hear the smile in Joan’s voice. “No, I had fun. I just didn’t know anyone very well, so the whole day was meeting new people.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and brought my breakfast to the table, where I sat down. “Have you heard of Bernice Bing?”

She considered the name for a moment. “I don’t know. Who is she?”

I turned my laptop around to face her, showing her the bio. “She was an artist here in San Francisco. She’s dead now.”

Joan skimmed the bio. “She had a show at SomArts, and I taught there around the same time. I might have met her, but I’m not sure.” She began to click through the pictures. “Her work feels familiar to me somehow.”

“I thought some of your early paintings looked like these,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose a little but she nodded. “Abstract Expressionism. It was hard to escape in the fifties and sixties. You know, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Most of the famous Ab-Ex artists were men, but that’s because back then it was still acceptable to say that women couldn’t be painters.”

“But you were painting,” I said. “And Bernice Bing.”