Jay DeFeo

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Jay DeFeo (March 31, 1929 - November 11, 1989) was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jay DeFeo with an unfinished "The Rose"

Born Mary Joan deFeo in Hanover, New Hampshire, she came to be known as 'Jay' in high school in San Jose, California. She found a mentor in her high school art teacher, and in 1946 enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. She resisted what she called 'the hierarchy of materials', using plaster and mixing media to experiment with effects, a thread one can see running through the art of that time, especially on the West Coast.

She had been exposed to North American native art in her Berkeley studies, thanks to Margaret Peterson O'Hagan; while in England she studied African and prehistoric art in London libraries. She spent a brief time working in Paris, traveling in Europe and North Africa, and for 6 months working in Florence, where she started to find her own kind of imagery.

Upon returning to Berkeley she rented an apartment where she continued her exploration with image and materials. In the mid-1950s, she supported herself by making and selling jewelry. She met Wally Hedrick, a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, whom she married in 1954 and divorced in 1969. Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, David Simpson, John Allen Ryan and Jack Spicer founded the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore St in San Francisco, on the location of the King Ubu Gallery, which had been run by Jess and Robert Duncan. Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Bruce Conner would become associates of the Six Gallery. Allen Ginsberg first read his poem, Howl, there at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955.

Her most well-known painting, The Rose, took almost eight years to create and weighs 2,300 pounds. Throughout her four decades of making art, DeFeo worked extensively making drawings, paintings on paper, photographs, collages, photo collages and paintings. In 1981 she joined the faculty of Mills College.

In April 1988 Jay DeFeo found that she had cancer. She died in 1989.