Jay DeFeo’s expansive approach to art-making combines expressionist paintings, symbolic drawings, unorthodox sculptural materials and photographic imagery. She studied studio art at the University of California, Berkeley, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1950 and 1951. She then travelled to Europe on a fellowship where her stay in Florence, Italy, was particularly generative, resulting in hundreds of works, including gestural and abstract tempera paintings with figurative and symbolic references.
After returning to Berkeley in 1953, she created paintings, plaster and wire sculptures, and jewellery. In 1954, J. DeFeo married artist Wally Hedrick (1928-2003, they would divorce in 1969) and moved to San Francisco, where one of her earliest solo exhibitions was held at The Place, a Beat hangout. The couple moved into a building on Fillmore Street that became a nexus for visual artists, writers and musicians. There she made photocollages, botanically inspired drawings and large-scale expressionist paintings. She was included in a ground-breaking exhibition of West Coast Abstract Expressionism in Los Angeles in 1955, organised by curator Walter Hopps, who later represented her at the Ferus Gallery. Her 1959 solo exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery inspired curator Dorothy Miller to include paintings and works on paper by J. DeFeo in the pace-setting exhibition Sixteen Americans (1959-60) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

When J. DeFeo and W. Hedrick were forced to vacate their flat in 1965, Hopps brought The Rose (1958-66) to the Pasadena Art Museum, where the artist continued working on the monumental painting for three months. The museum exhibited the work in 1969 and screened Bruce Conner’s film THE WHITE ROSE (1967), about the painting’s dramatic extraction from J. DeFeo’s second-floor studio window. The Rose travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) and the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where J. DeFeo was then teaching; it stayed there for decades. Following the painting’s conservation in 1995, it was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the 1970s and 1980s, J. DeFeo taught at SFAI, California College of Arts and Crafts, Sonoma State University and Mills College, where she would become a tenured professor in 1982. After Image (1970) and Crescent Bridge II (1970-72) are two examples of the directions her practice took in the early 1970s, as she explored the surreal forms of everyday objects. Photography began to play a central role in that creative process, and she experimented with photograms, chemigrams and xerography. A 1973-74 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship afforded her a new camera and a darkroom. Around this time, she created a series of photocollages inspired by her conversations with B. Conner. In 1978, J. DeFeo had a solo exhibition at UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum and found representation with Paule Anglim Gallery. After moving to a larger studio in Oakland in the early 1980s, she created large-scale paintings using oil and mixed media; these dynamic compositions of organic and geometric elements are activated by her characteristically textured surfaces and, in works like La Brea (1984-85), a more vibrant use of colour.

J. DeFeo was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from SFAI in 1982, and the 1983-84 Adaline Kent Award, which featured a large one-person exhibition, Jay DeFeo: Selected Works, Past and Present (1984). In 1985, she was awarded a second NEA grant. She was prolific throughout the 1980s, and her trips to Hawaii, Japan and Kenya inspired new bodies of work. She died of lung cancer aged 60 in 1989. Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper opened at UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum in 1990 and travelled to the Menil Collection, Houston, among other venues. In 2012, the Whitney Museum organized a retrospective that travelled to SFMOMA. Several recent exhibitions have explored the breadth of J. DeFeo’s art practice and her legacy in the history of American abstract painting.