THE JAY DEFEO FOUNDATION ADDS NEW TRUSTEE AND ANNOUNCES ITS NEW NAME
On May 25, the Jay DeFeo Foundation’s cotrustees Leah Levy and Jane A. Green announced that museum consultant Diane B. Frankel will join the organization as its third trustee. “I enthusiastically welcome [Frankel],” Green, a longtime board member of the Berkeley Museum, said. “I know that her professional expertise will greatly serve to support and enhance the mission of the Foundation as it honors Jay DeFeo’s art and ideas, and makes her contribution accessible as a charitable resource.”
In the 1990s, Frankel served as the director of graduate programs in museum studies at John F. Kennedy University and headed the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, DC. From 2000 to 2004, Frankel directed the Children, Youth and Families Program at the James Irvine Foundation. Since then, she has served as the interim director at di Rosa, the executive director of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, and an affiliate of Management Consultants for the Arts. She currently sits on the board of the San Francisco Art Institute and is a member of the Getty Photo Council.
The Foundation also announced that it had changed its name—it was previously know as the Jay DeFeo Trust. Established by artist Jay DeFeo as an educational resource for her art and archive, the organization believes the new name more accurately reflects its mission and its involvement in nonprofit work. Executive director and trustee Leah Levy said, “[DeFeo] had a vision for a place in art history for her own artworks and an instinct for philanthropy.”
Born in New Hampshire in 1929, DeFeo—whose career spanned more than four decades—grew up in San Francisco, where she became an influential figure in the Bay Area’s art scene. She is perhaps best known for her monumental work titled The Rose, 1958–66. The painting is now in the Whitney Museum’s collection. The foundation joined the Whitney in a massive conservation effort to restore the work in 1995. DeFeo, who died of cancer in 1989, at the age of sixty, provided for the establishment of a private trust to care for her own artworks and for the promotion of the arts in her will.
