Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo (b. 1929, New Hampshire) was a celebrated member of the San Franciscan community of artists, poets, and jazz musicians. DeFeo often incorporated a wide variety of media into her artworks, using plaster, paper, and plastic to create painterly collages. Similarly, she practised a multiplicity of art forms, including drawing, painting, photography. The artist is best known for her monumental work The Rose, which took almost eight years to create and weighed a tonne when completed. The piece is built out of layers of mica, oil, and wood on a canvas, and in DeFeo’s words represented a ‘marriage between painting and sculpture’. The Whitney Museum of American Art conserved and acquired The Rose in 1995.

DeFeo studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is held in the permanent public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, and Centre Pompidou. Her work has been exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; the Getty Centre, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Jay DeFeo Foundation was established to encourage the arts and preserve DeFeo’s work.

DeFeo died in 1989