Jay DeFeo, Encore

Abstract

This essay argues that Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo’s overidentification with The Rose (1958–66), has resulted in a historiography that consistently—and as I claim, wrongly—frames her career thereafter in terms of aftermath. Against narratives of “before and after” upheld by writers on DeFeo, this essay maintains that The Rose represents neither a consummation nor a cleavage; rather, it came to stand for DeFeo for incipient possibility, encompassing and then generating a lexicon of forms. The still larger stakes involve the role collections intended for public archives play in private lives. The Archives of American Art’s interest in DeFeo beginning in 1974 arguably accelerated her imaging of futurity, encouraging not just new work but her work’s preservation—alongside that of related papers, diaries, records, and oral histories—in anticipation of future audiences who might still receive it.