Jayne County (also known as Wayne County and V. W. Rogers) was born in 1946 in Dallas, Georgia. She moved to New York in 1968 and was a regular at the Stonewall Inn and an active participant in the Stonewall Riots. In 1969, she began her career working with playwright Jackie Curtis and also with John Vaccaro and Tony Ingrassia of Theater of the Ridiculous. Andy Warhol cast County in his theatrical production of Pork, and, after the New York run, the play moved to London. While there, County met David Bowie and was signed to his MainMan record label. County is best known as the vocalist in her bands Queen Elizabeth (1972), Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys (1974), and Wayne County and the Electric Chairs (1977). She was also the house DJ at Max’s Kansas City. In 1978, County appeared in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, in which she performed her song, Paranoia Paradise. County has released many records on several record labels. Her autobiography, Man Enough to be a Woman, was released in 1995, and in 1997, she was immortalized in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk, Chapter 29: Fun with Dick and Jayne. In 2018, County presented the first retrospective exhibition of her visual artwork at PARTICIPANT INC in New York, curated by Michael Fox. Since then, she has has had several solo exhibitions including Pillar of Society at James Barron Art in Kent, CT in 2018, Bastet: Goddess of Wet Dreams at Marlborough Gallery in New York City in 2020, Penis Planet at Pasaquan in Beuna Vista, GA in 2021 followed by an exhibition of these works at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY in 2022, and Jayne County’s Electric Dreams at Emory University in Atlanta, GA in 2025. County’s career spans six decades, and she has lived and worked in New York, London, Berlin, and currently lives in Georgia. County’s work has always protested the societal norms by which she has never been constrained.
County’s body of visual artwork does not fit neatly into any one category. She is a self-developed artist whose work serves as an emotional release. Her fantasies, rage, and notions of beauty erupt in works on paper and canvas with varying degrees of transparency and complexity. Her intentions are sometimes laser- focused, as is the case with her ‘rage art,’ in which she illustrates her thoughts and feelings on political figures. Her abstract works are without specific figurative or popular culture reference, yet seem to express a similar violent energy or whirlwind of volatile emotion. Much of County’s work offers a glimpse into her fantasies, which are populated by creatures from other worlds and times; and her obsessions, manifested in repeated motifs such as trees bearing multiple penises and vaginas.

