In the California winter of 1965, Jay DeFeo was evicted from the San Francisco apartment that had become a temple for her 2000-pound colossus of a painting, The Rose. The morning after it was safely carried out the front window, DeFeo was forced to destroy the only other artwork she'd started in six years, an enormous painting on paper stapled directly to her hallway wall. The unfinished Estocada-a kind of shadow Rose-was ripped down in unruly chunks, carried to her new home, and reanimated years later through photography, photocopy, collage, and relief. Drawing from largely unpublished archival material, Rip Tales traces Estocada's life and multiple afterlives, offering insight into DeFeo's evolution as an artist and her instinct for self-cataloguing. It's a study of process and processing, and of the contradictions that galvanized the artist's practice: fragment versus whole, subject versus object, and margin versus center.Rip Tales further includes the stories and voices of Bay Area artists whose practices similarly evoke themes of transformation and contingency, including April Dawn Alison, Ruth Asawa, Lutz Bacher, Dewey Crumpler, Vincent Fecteau.. Through essay, interview, eulogy, and recipe, author Jordan Stein interrogates and celebrates a Bay Area ethos that could be defined by its discomfort with definitions. Trading on the literal and metaphorical gravity of DeFeo's last-minute rip, this idiosyncratic book foregrounds the unpredictable edges of artworks, archives, and ideas.

The Rat Bastard ProtectiveÊAssociation was an inflammatory, close-knit community of artists who livedÊand worked in aÊbuilding they dubbed Painterland in the Fillmore neighborhood of midcentury San Francisco. The artists who counted themselves among the RatÊBastardsÑwhich included Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo,ÊWallyÊHedrick, Michael McClure, and Manuel NeriÑexhibited a unique fusion of radicalism,Êprovocation, and community. Geographically isolated from a viable art market and refusingÊto conform to institutional expectations, theyÊanimated broader social andÊartistic discussions through their work and became aÊtransformative part of American culture over time. Anastasia Aukeman presents new and little-known archival material in this authorized account of these artists and their circle, a colorful cultural milieu that intersected with the broader Beat scene.

A long overdue, comprehensive look at Jay DeFeo's career as an avant-garde artist

A remarkable portrait of a web of artistic connections, traced outward from Jay DeFeo's uniquely generative work of art Through deep archival research and nuanced analysis, Elizabeth Ferrell examines the creative exchange that developed with and around The Rose, a monumental painting on which the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) worked almost exclusively from 1958 to 1966. From its early state to its dramatic removal from DeFeo's studio, the painting was a locus of activity among Fillmore District artists. Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, and Michael McClure each took up The Rose in their photographs, films, paintings, and poetry, which DeFeo then built upon in turn. The resulting works established a dialogue between artists rather than seamless cooperation. Illustrated with archival photographs and personal correspondence, in addition to the artworks, Ferrell's book traces how The Rose became a stage for experimentation with authorship and community, defying traditional definitions of collaboration and creating alternatives to Cold War America's political and artistic binaries.

Rarely has an artist been so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her painting "The Rose". In this major study of "The Rose" in particular and of Jay DeFeo in general, 11 art and cultural historians and writers unfold the story of the creation and rescue of her masterpiece.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a leader of the assemblage movement in California. Conner had close ties with poets of the San Francisco Renaissance (particularly Michael McClure) as well as with artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Jess and Jay DeFeo. Conner's use of nylon stockings in his assemblages quickly won him notoriety, and saw his work included in Peter Selz's classic 1961 Art of Assemblage show at MoMA. Around this time, Conner also turned to film-making, and produced in swift succession a number of short films that helped to pioneer the rapid edit and the use of pop music among independent film-makers. Conner's innovative editing techniques and decidedly dark vision of American culture laid the foundation for later Hollywood directors such as Dennis Hopper (a friend and collaborator of Conner's, who frequently acknowledged his influence) and David Lynch. A long overdue and significant addition to the understanding of twentieth-century American art and cinema, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II represents the most comprehensive book to date on Conner's work from the 1950s to the present. The authors elucidate Conner's work in film, assemblage, drawing, printmaking, collage, and photograms, as well as his more ephemeral gestures, actions, protests and "escapes" from the art world. This beautifully designed clothbound monograph is a landmark publication for anyone interested in contemporary art, film, culture and the Beat era.