DeFeo produced a diverse body of painting, drawing, collage, and photography that presents a highly individual vision of an artist’s physical environment, personal history, and metaphysical concerns. In 1959 DeFeo’s first major solo exhibition was held at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco, the same year that DeFeo’s art–along with that of her husband Wally Hedrick–and Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, and others, was included in Dorothy Miller’s momentous exhibition Sixteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. True to their defiant dispositions, neither DeFeo nor Hedrick attended the opening reception for this important exhibition.