Tony Delap (American 1927-) grew up in the Bay Area and studied art, illustration, and graphic design at several Bay Area colleges, including the San Francisco Academy of Art;  he also attended the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He returned to the Bay Area, where he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, the San Francisco Art Institute and at UC Davis until he secured a teaching position at the newly founded campus of the University of California, Irvine. DeLap has been a mentor to some notable artists, including Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and John McCracken. With artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, DeLap followed a path of Geometric abstraction and Minimal art embracing the principles of limited color, geometry, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor since the early 1960s associated with an emerging movement of West Coast minimalism referred to as "finish fetish," with artists such as Craig Kauffman, Larry Bell, and DeWain Valentine.

DeLap's work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally in several important group exhibitions of the 1960s including; Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum; American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

COLLECTIONS: San Jose Museum; LACMA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; San Francisco MOMA; Whitney Museum; The Museum of Modern Art; The Guggenheim; The Walker Art Center; and the Tate, among others.