DeFeo, Jay, 1929-1989

Artist Mary Joan (Jay) DeFeo was born in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1929 and moved with her family to the San Francisco Bay Area at age three. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Fine Arts at UC Berkeley and won a fellowship after graduation that took her to France, Spain, northern Africa and Italy. In Florence she met artist Clinton Hill, with whom she developed a lasting friendship. In the mid-1950s DeFeo settled in San Francisco and met regularly with Beat poets and artists including Joan and William Brown, Sonia Gechtoff and Michael McClure. She became associated with artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Bruce Conner, Ed Kienholz and her husband, Wally Hedrick. Influenced by their experimentation with found images, DeFeo applied a similar aesthetic to her mixed media paintings using newspaper, gouache, graphite and tempera. She later worked with photography and photo-collage. DeFeo had her first solo exhibition in 1954 at The Place, a cafe in San Francisco's North Beach. Her work was also shown in Walter Hopps's Action I group show at the Santa Monica Pier in 1955, and at other venues including Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Her best-known painting is "The Rose" (1958-1966), a 2,300-pound canvas that took nearly a decade to complete. DeFeo died in 1989.

From the description of Jay DeFeo letters to Clinton Hill and Allen Tran, 1954-1963. (Getty Research Institute). WorldCat record id: 664395951

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