greater part of DeFeo’s work on The Rose terminated when she was evicted from her Fillmore Street apartment in November 1965. Her friend Bruce Conner stated that an “uncontrolled event” was necessary to force her to finish this work, and he documented its removal from her apartment in a short film titled The White Rose (1967). As the film shows, the painting was so large that the wall below a window opening had to be knocked out to remove it. Conner captured DeFeo dangling her feet from a fire escape as she watched the work being removed by forklift and then carried off in a moving van. The painting was transported to the Pasadena Art Museum, where DeFeo added finishing details in 1966, before taking a four-year break from creating art. In 1969, the work was finally shown in solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), with an accompanying essay authored by Fred Martin. Martin later arranged for the painting to be stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it remained hidden behind a wall, in need of conservation, until 1995, when the Whitney Museum of American Art conserved and acquired the work for its collection. Artistic style and later career During her four decades of making art, DeFeo worked in a variety of media, creating drawings, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photographs, photocopies, collages, and photo collages. Using an experimental approach to each medium, DeFeo developed her own “visual vocabulary,” playing with scale, color vs. black and white, texture or the illusion of texture, and precision vs. ambiguity. She wrote, “I do believe that more so than most artists, I maintain a kind of consciousness of everything I’ve ever done while I’m engaged on a current work.” DeFeo often made her artwork in series—exploring, for example, light and dark versions, as well as mirror opposites. At times her artwork took off from a small quotidian object, such as a dental bridge or swimming goggles, transforming the everyday into something with “universal character.” During the 1970s, DeFeo took a particular interest in photography. In 1970, a friend loaned DeFeo a Mamiya camera, and with the help of photography students in her art classes, she learned how to develop film and make prints. When DeFeo won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973, she bought a Hasselblad camera and