Recently discovered work demonstrates DeFeo’s status as a major contemporary photographer.
Jay DeFeo
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The Courtauld Presents a Symposium on Artist Jay DeFeo
On Friday, May 28, join The Courtauld Institute of Art for a free online conference on the expansive and unorthodox work of Jay DeFeo.
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Learn About Jay DeFeo’s Photography in the Online Panel Discussion Catching Ideas in Process
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Rayyane Tabet, and Corey Keller will discuss a lesser-known body of DeFeo’s work on November 18 at 5pm (PST).
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Jay DeFeo and the Anarchic Spirit of Surrealism
For DeFeo, Surrealism was not a technique, but a state of seeing and experiencing everyday life.
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A Celebration of the Rat Bastards: Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, and Others
Shortly after coming to San Francisco, Conner formed what he christened the “Rat Bastard Society.” Conner told the curator Peter Boswell that the name was fitting for “people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.”
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Sexism and the Canon: Three Female Artists Reflect on ‘Women of Abstract Expressionism’
DENVER — The paintings in Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum are rich with emotion, monumental in scale, and totally original.
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From Calder to Kruger, the New Whitney Museum’s First Show
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
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Searching for Jay DeFeo (Again)
A show like the one currently up at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which homes in on Jay DeFeo’s post-“Rose” output until her death in 1989, is still direly important.
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“The Rose” Is Not A Rose
From 1955 to 1966, Jay DeFeo and her painter husband, Wally Hedrick, lived at 2322 Fillmore Street, San Francisco. They were at the center of a lively, politically anarchic milieu of artists and poets that included Bruce and Jean Conner, Joan and Bill Brown, Deborah Remington, Sonia Gechtoff and James Kelly, Jess, Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer and others. Largely centered around small galleries and presses such as the Auerhahn Press, City Lights bookstore and press, the legendary Six Gallery (which Hedrick helped start), the East & West Gallery (run by Gechtoff’s mother), Batman Gallery, and Dilexi, this loosely allied group had no counterpart in New York. For various reasons, most of the figures associated with this group would neither be integrated into, nor adequately recognized by, the East Coast art establishment.
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Can’t-Miss New York Museum Shows in 2013
With a brand new year comes a slew of new museum exhibitions to look forward to. From retrospectives of major artists like Claes Oldenburg and James Turrell to an exploration of New York City art during one year in the 1990s, here’s a look at what to expect from NYC’s art museums in 2013.
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How to Be a Lady Painter
I think it’s funny that Patricia Albers’s recent and authoritative biography on Joan Mitchell was given the subtitle “Lady Painter.” It’s my only guess that Mitchell’s lifestyle and her painting were so out of character for the time that the term becomes ironic. The artist was known for her camaraderie with Cedar Tavern macho dudes like de Kooning and Pollock, her hangout sessions with beatnik poets, her ability to party, and her tendency to drink and sleep around with bravado. At the time these activities and attitudes were thought to be reserved for men. Mitchell gradually carved out a space for her paintings to be given the same treatment.
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Can We Still Learn To Speak Martian?
Let us start with two addresses just a few blocks from each other in San Francisco, and what was happening there in the early and mid-1950s. On Halloween, 1954, the Six Gallery opened at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The six founders were Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward King, David Simpson, John Ryan and Jack Spicer. Their shared interest was to have a place to exhibit art and host literary events, to put art and poetry on the walls, side by side. At the debut exhibition, Spicer’s poems were in fact on the wall, just like the paintings and drawings of the other co-founders.
