Past Exhibitions

6 September–18 December 2005

“I worked on photography alone . . . and gave it nearly as much attention as painting in the early 1970s. . . .Most of the work . . . was concerned with photographing various objects that later became ‘models’ for the paintings to come. The best of them have a kind of haunting quality I think . . . surrealists leanings . . . a sense of portraiture in landscape surroundings. . . . It is worthy of mention because it has had a most important role in my work as a whole.”

—Jay DeFeo, Letter to Dorothy Miller, 1977

In her lifetime Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) produced hundreds of evocative drawings, paintings and photo collages. A leader in San Francisco’s avant-garde art and poetry world of the 1950s, along with Allen Ginsberg, she is known as an abstract expressionist, a Beat painter, a Funk artist, an eccentric and a romantic. Even so, her work was virtually unknown beyond the West Coast, although she was prominently featured in a 1975 exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. After the Berkeley Art Museum’s traveling exhibition Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper reintroduced her to the art world in 1990, her reputation began to grow. In 2003, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York made her painting The Rose a focal point of an exhibition, the first in New York, in conjunction with a book on the subject. This massive, radiant impasto, built up layer upon layer over seven years, was DeFeo’s masterpiece of the 1960s. Weighing more than a ton and measuring 7.5 x 11 feet, the painting is central to her work as well as the breadth of her artistic activity.

Forty years worth of writings provides a solid foundation for understanding the complexities of DeFeo’s oeuvre. Yet much still needs to be examined to get a complete picture. Certainly, her photography has received scant attention. This exhibition, developed by the Mills College Art Museum, introduces viewers to a range of her photographic work and aims to encourage further exploration of this remarkable artist’s contribution to the medium. Says Anthony W. Lee, associate professor of art at Mount Holyoke, "DeFeo's photographs are at once beautiful and grotesque, abstract and bodily, carefully wrought and informed. Although they dramatically augment the ways we understand her more famous paintings, they are key experiments in photography as well."

The 30 images, mostly unique prints made between 1972 and 1974, raise a range of vital questions about DeFeo’s artwork and practice. While there are numerous ways of approaching her photographs, they share a singular and constant strategy of engaging the viewer. DeFeo never fails to invite us to first formally analyze her work and then to reward our sustained looking, usually with another question out of our own heads.

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