Jay DeFeo
"Untitled", 1979
Photocopy
17 x 11 inches (43.2 x 27.9 cm)
Courtesy of The Jay DeFeo Foundation
Photo credit: The Jay DeFeo Foundation

Selected by Gary Garrels

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), the San Francisco-based artist who created an original and provocative body of work, is counted among those artists who influenced the course of American art after Abstract Expressionism. She achieved national recognition as a painter in the 1950s associated with the Beat generation of artists, musicians and poets, and then focused her artistic energies on the monumental and iconic painting The Rose (1958-66), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.  In the 1970s and 80s, DeFeo continued her prolific creative work in a growing range of media, including painting, works on paper, photography, photocopy and collage, which continue to inspire new generations of artists. A retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012.  

The recent monograph Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work, published by DelMonico Books in 2023, explores her photographs and photocopy work, including essays by Hilton Als, Corey Keller, Dana Miller and Justine Kurland.

Works by Jay DeFeo are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, J. Paul Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and many others. 

Information about the artist’s life and work can be found on the website of The Jay DeFeo Foundation:  www.jaydefeofoundation.org