DeLap and John Coplans were founding faculty members in the 1965 opening of the University of California at Irvine, where DeLap taught in the Art Department until 1991. DeLap served as the project consultant for Best Kept Secret, UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971 as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art In LA 1945-1980 held at the Laguna Art Museum.
As a pioneer artist of Abstractionism, Minimalism and Op Art on the West Coast, he has been included in such landmark exhibitions as The Responsive Eye (1965: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY), Primary Structures (1966: Jewish Museum, New York, NY), and American Sculpture of the Sixties (1967: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA). In 2018, the Laguna Museum of Art mounted a major retrospective of DeLap’s work dating from 1961 to present, curated by Peter Frank, and accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.
His work resides in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC ; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, among many others.