Jay DeFeo

Born in Hanover, NH, as Mary Joan DeFeo, she became known as ‘Jay’ DeFeo while attending high school in San Jose, California. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a master’s degree in 1951, both in studio art, at the University of California, Berkeley. DeFeo first became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. In 1959 her work was included in the exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1960 Walter Hopps and Irving Blum at the influential Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles mounted a solo exhibition of her work. Best known for her monumental painting The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, now held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum, the de Young Museum, the Hammer Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others.