Jay DeFeo (March 31, 1929 – November 11, 1989) was a visual artist who first became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.” Life and work Early life Jay DeFeo was born Mary Joan DeFeo on March 31, 1929, in Hanover, New Hampshire, to a nurse from an Austrian immigrant family and an Italian-American medical student. In 1932, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her father graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and became a traveling doctor for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Between 1935 and 1938, DeFeo traveled around rural parts of Northern California with her parents, and also spent extensive time with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Colorado as well as with her paternal grandparents in the more urban Oakland, California. When DeFeo’s parents divorced in 1939, DeFeo joined her mother in San Jose, California, where DeFeo attended Alum Rock Union School and excelled in art. In high school DeFeo acquired the nickname “Jay,” which she used as her common name for the rest of her life. An important early mentor was her high school art teacher, Lena Emery, who took her to museums to see works by Picasso and Matisse, opening up a new world to the young artist. DeFeo enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946, studying with many well-known art professors, including Margaret Peterson O’Hagan. Fellow students included Pat Adams, Walter Askin Sam Francis, and Fred Martin. In her artwork, she resisted what she called "the hierarchy of material", 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. Beginning art career In 1953 DeFeo returned to Berkeley, where she created large plaster sculptures, works on paper, and small wire jewelry. She met the artist Wally Hedrick and they married in 1954. At first they lived on Bay Street in San Francisco, close to the California School of Fine Arts, where DeFeo worked as an artist’s model. DeFeo focused on making jewelry to support herself, as well as creating small paintings and drawings. It was during this time that DeFeo had her first one-person exhibition