Jay McCafferty Estate

In April 2026, we debuted an all new platform, rich in visual material, including new photography of the artist’s artwork in every medium and from every period, and newly digitized archival material, that is now indexed and searchable, alongside expansive verbal material, including a special Artist page featuring a sweeping, downloadable Chronology and CV, and a new quarterly series, In Focus, researched and written by Campagnola and Brent Foster Jones. To add depth and completeness, the website includes selections of the artist’s video works, shared with the estate by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles that holds McCafferty’s complete video archive.

The inaugural essay of the In Focus series, titled “Confronting It,” looks at the year 1981, when the artist began creating “controlled burn marks on paper that revealed halos of intense, glowing hues” and when he challenged himself to work on an unprecedented scale—a brightly colored, epically scaled site-specific solar burn triptych installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “Highly regarded in the Los Angeles art scene, having won the LACMA New Talent Award in 1974 and fresh off a dazzling Artforum review, in 1981 McCafferty was invited by newly hired Curator of Modern Art Stephanie Barron to participate in the exhibition The Museum as Site: Sixteen Projects,” the essay notes. And continues, “In response to the museum architecture’s striking New Formalist rows of concrete columns, McCafferty burned, painted, and patched canvas in monumental dimensions, producing Between, a site-specific work consisting of three, vertical banners. Each banner measured fifty-two feet high and eight feet wide and was suspended in alternate bays, cascading from the roof of the east façade of the now demolished Ahmanson Gallery.” In the essay, they clarify that “from the outset, fire was not simply a tool but a primary medium” for the artist. “Initially he mostly burned paper—sometimes pigmented, sometimes plain, following a grid or freely guided by instinct. Over time though, he extended this practice to other materials, including wood and cardboard, testing how the burns would behave across different surfaces and densities.”

The platform has been launched alongside a new educational channel on Instagram, @JayMcCaffertyEstate, which shares the artist’s textured, tactile works together with archival material to reveal an artist who, on the cutting edge of the experimentation taking place in Southern California in the latter part of the 20th century, pushed his practice to its limits. As of this writing, we are supporting the estate to renew critical appreciation of the artist’s work, identify legal and dealer representation, and to collaborate with institutions that hold work made by the artist, such as the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.