Over the course of a career spanning four decades, Jay DeFeo (b. 1929, Hanover, NH, d. 1989, Oakland, CA) experimented widely with a range of unorthodox materials, exploring the parameters of painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photocopies, and photography. In 1959 her work was featured in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1958 to 1966 DeFeo worked almost exclusively on her masterpiece, The Rose. First exhibited in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, the work was subsequently installed at the San Francisco Art Institute, before being acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. In 2012 the Whitney organized Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One-person exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have taken place at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1990), and the San Jose Museum of Art, California (2019), among others. In 2018 Le Consortium in Dijon, France, organized Jay DeFeo: The Ripple Effect, a show examining her legacy and lasting influence on contemporary artists working today, which travelled to the Aspen Art Museum. DeFeo’s works are in the collections of many museums, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Menil Collection, Houston; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; and The Centre Pompidou, Paris.