Viola Frey

Viola Frey
File:Viola Frey with her sculptures.jpg Viola Frey with her sculptures, photo by M. Lee Fatherree
Born	(1933-08-15)August 15, 1933 Lodi, California
Died	Oakland, California
Nationality	American
Known for	Sculpture, Painting, and Drawing

Viola Frey (August 15, 1933 – July 26, 2004) was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

Life and work

Born in 1933, Viola Frey grew up on her family's vineyard in Lodi, California, and died in Oakland, California, in 2004. She received a BFA in 1956 from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) where she studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Vernon "Corky" Coykendall and Charles Fiske. Her fellow students included Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira. After receiving her bachelor's degree, she attended graduate school at Tulane University and studied with Mark Rothko and George Rickey. She left Tulane in 1957 without receiving her master's degree and moved to New York to work with ceramicist Katherine Choy at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York. The Clay Art Center was one of the earliest venues on the East Coast geared toward artists exploring ceramics as a fine art medium without the functional constraints of craft.

Frey returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1960 where she became an internationally respected artist and leading figure in contemporary ceramics. She was well known for her monumental, brightly colored ceramic sculptures, which explore issues of gender, cultural iconography and art history. Along with Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos, Frey reshaped and defined the use of ceramics as a fine art medium through her robust sculptures. "Frey was one of a number of California artists working in clay in the 1950s and 60s who turned away from that medium's conventions to produce works with robust sculptural qualities associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Pop art and what would come to be known as California Funk." "Viola has had a profound impact on the visual arts. She was able to take the culture around her and reform those elements into a totally original form of sculpture that defined one of the great contributions to modern art," commented Michael S. Roth, former President of the California College of the Arts.

In the 1970s, after moving to a larger studio in Oakland, Frey started creating her signature larger-than-life ceramic figures. Standing up to twelve feet high and constructed of separate pieces, the massive men appear in generic suits and ties, while the large female figures are often depicted in heavily patterned, 1950s-style dresses.

As expressed in an essay by art critic Donald Kuspit, "Frey has certainly tested—aggressively stretched—the limits of freestanding sculpture in her giant, brash, richly colored figures, but her plate pieces—essentially pictorial reliefs—are more subdued, indeed much more introverted." Frey's tondo plates, ranging in size from 26 inches to 36 inches in diameter, are described by Kuspit as "a remarkable, innovative, contribution to ceramic sculpture, for she shows that it can be formally exciting as well as iconographically trenchant without losing its intimate touch…"

Frey was an avid collector of ceramic figurines and other nick-nacks found in flea markets, and her vast collection of tchotchkes inspired a body of her ceramic works, which she called bricolage sculptures, based on the term used by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind. As explained by Garth Clark in his essay for Frey's 1981 retrospective exhibition, bricolage translates from French as "an object made by the bricoleur, a junk man or handy man... The bricoleur picks up odds and ends from his time… and makes unique projects out of unknown things." Identifying with Lévi-Strauss's description of the bricoleur, Frey made molds and slipcasts of her flea market findings to create unique ceramic assemblage works composed of a cornucopia of cascading figures and objects.

Although most renowned for her ceramic sculptures, Frey also created a significant body of two-dimensional works that have been widely exhibited. Her paintings and pastel drawings reflect her love of the human figure, her colorful palate, and iconography similar to that used in her sculptures.

Frey lived surrounded by art and an immense collection of approximately 4,000 art books. Committed to her art, she continued working almost until the end of her life.

Museum exhibitions

Frey's work has been shown in hundreds of museum exhibitions at venues that include the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Manufacture nationale de Sèvreswith creation of sculptures and painting plates, France; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Musee Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Museum of Ceramic Art, Hyogo, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Arts of the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga, Japan; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Oakland Museum, California; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and numerous others. Her posthumous survey exhibition, Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey was presented at the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario in 2009, and also traveled in 2010 to the Museum of Arts and Design., NY, and the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock.

Public collections

Frey's work resides in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Honolulu Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musee National de Ceramique de Sèvres, Paris; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Arts of the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga, Japan; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Oakland Museum of California; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others.

Teaching career

Frey joined the faculty at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1965, and continued a relationship with the college through 1999 as full professor and chair of the Ceramics Program. During her tenure, Frey guided the design of the Noni Eccles Treadwell Ceramic Arts Center on the college's Oakland campus. She was awarded the status of professor emerita in 1999, and the college established the Viola Frey Chair in Fine Arts in 2003.

Recognition

The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and an American Craft Council fellow, Frey was also presented with the Award of Honor in Sculpture from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Legacy

The Artists' Legacy Foundation was co-founded by Viola Frey and artist Squeak Carnwath. The Foundation promotes, protects, and maintains the legacy of Foundation artists; supports outstanding painters and sculptors through awards and grants; and advances the visual arts through education, exhibitions, publications, and research. The Artists' Legacy Foundation manages Frey's artwork and estate, and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York.