Biography

Oakland-based artist Viola Frey is best known for her colorful, larger-than-life figurative sculptures made of clay. Frey’s figures are often cartoonish, fitting somewhere between the Bay Area Figurative tradition, with its love for gestural paint and chromatic brilliance, and the Davis school’s propensity towards outlandish humor. Frey began creating her vibrant cast of characters in the late 1970s, yet according to art historian Patterson Sims, they seem to date from “some unplaceable decade between 1920 and 1960, when women dressed in strongly patterned prints and men wore ties and tightly buttoned suits.”1

Frey was born on her family’s farm in Lodi, California, the second of four children. She studied art at Stockton Delta College and later transferred to the California College of Arts (CCA), where she majored in painting and studied under Richard Diebenkorn, working alongside fellow students Robert Bechtle, Charles Gill, and Manuel Neri. At CCA, Frey took an elective course in ceramics and thereafter changed her major, convinced that she had found her niche. Soon after graduation in 1956, she decided to move to New Orleans to continue her study in ceramics at Tulane University, working with professor Catherine Choy. After Frey had culminated her studies and earned her M.F.A., Choy invited the young ceramic sculptor to work at the Cooperative Clay Art Center in Portchester, New York, an institution that Choy founded. Frey returned to the Bay Area in 1960, where she remains to this day. She began exhibiting her work and teaching at CCA, joining the faculty full-time in 1970.

Frey’s work is often linked with that of the Davis school artists, such as William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Roy De Forest, who embraced satire and idiosyncrasy, and explored personal mythology. Yet for all its quirkiness and bravura execution, her work tends to have a more gently humorous and less biting take on humanity than that of her Davis school colleagues. San Francisco Chronicle critic Thomas Albright pinpoints the distinctive nature of her work: “The human figures, particularly, had some of the odd charm and faintly disturbing presence of folk sculpture.”2

A classic example of Frey’s work, Fire Suit depicts a towering male figure attired in a brilliant red “power” suit. As in much of Frey’s work, the humorous effect comes from his ungainly stance and painfully earnest expression—the enormous man’s awkwardness cancels out any possibility for intimidation. The artist’s ability to combine elements of painting with sculpture is evident in the surface of the figure, which is energetically painted and boldly textured. The hulking figure might be seen as an enormous three-dimensional canvas, echoing her early training as a painter, when she was surrounded by the influence of Bay Area Figurative artists. Does the sculpture represent a specific person? “I would say I doubt it,” responded Frey. “I doubt that any of them are specific people … I would say that that man is about the suit. That’s where the power comes from. It’s the suit. That comes from having worked in the accounting office at downtown Macy’s for ten years to support my art, or working in New York, where I saw those suits going to and from work every day. As an image, it’s inescapable.”3

Frey’s contribution extends beyond the objects she sculpted. As art historian Whitney Chadwick has pointed out, “In an era in which women’s access to the arts was largely mediated by relationships with male artists, and ‘artist’ implied a certain machismo, Frey confronted in her own work issues of masculinity, femininity, power (and powerlessness), scale, and what it means to be an artist and a woman.”4 Her work exists in the realm between painting and ceramic sculpture, seeming to balance whimsical humor and profound humanism. Frey holds a significant place in the history of ceramic art, and has earned her reputation as a Bay Area Figurative artist who creates cartoonish ceramic characters that both confound and delight. —J.N.

1. Patterson Sims, Viola Frey: It’s All Part of the Clay (Philadelphia: The Galleries at Moore, 1984), 6.
2. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 249.
3. Jan Butterfield, “Viola Frey: The Figure is Always There,” Viola Frey, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Quay Gallery, 1983), 3.
4. Whitney Chadwick, “Viola Frey: Works on Paper,” Viola Frey: Fresno Art Museum, exh. cat. (Fresno, Calif.: Fresno Art Museum, 1991), 5.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


From Getty ULAN:  Known for her large figurative, glazed clay sculptures that drew on Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and California Funk. Her work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

From Artist Legacy foundation: http://www.artistslegacyfoundation.org/legacy-artists/Viola-Frey/biography.php
Viola Frey was born in 1933 in Lodi, California, and died in Oakland, California, in 2004. She is well known for her large, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture. 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.

Frey moved to San Francisco in 1960 after studying at Tulane University. In the early 60s she began producing large plates and assemblages as well as sculptures and paintings. In 1965 Frey began teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts. It was not until the late 70s, after moving into her large studio in Oakland, that she had room to start creating her signature larger-than-life figures. Standing about nine feet high and constructed of separate pieces, with visible seams, these massive men and women are rendered in a simplified style. The men appear in generic suits and ties and the women in simple, 50s-style dresses and old-fashioned hairdos. Bright colors and heavily textured surfaces are integral to Frey’s work. While some of her art is highly autobiographical in nature, her large figures deal with universal themes of social interaction in an increasingly complex world.

In addition to the large scale, Frey was drawn to the miniature. She began collecting ceramic figurines in flea markets near her home in Oakland. Some inspired her large sculptures, and others provided imagery for her paintings, drawings and assemblage pieces. In her vividly colored drawings she incorporated many of her purchases, such as the bear, rooster, dog, and horse, containing them in a sealed environment.

Frey lived surrounded by art and art books. She collected some 4,000 books, which she often used as references for her works. Committed to her art, she continued working almost until the end of her life.
Education:

    1953 Stockton Delta College, Stockton, California
    1956 California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California—BFA
    1958 Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana


Born in Lodi, California, Oakland-based artists Viola Frey attended Stockton Delta College and then California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), where she studied painting under Richard Diebenkorn and majored in ceramics, earning her B.F.A. in 1956. Following graduation from CCAC she enrolled in Tulane University, where she studied ceramics under Catherine Choy and painting with Marc Rothko. She received a M.F.A. in 1958. She then moved to Chester, New York to work at the Cooperative Clay Art Center. In 1965 she began teaching at CCAC and joined the CCAC faculty as a full-time professor in 1970. Her work has been included in both solo and group exhibition at institutions like the De Young Museum, San Francisco; the Fresno Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Laguna Art Museum; and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angles, among others. This will be the first piece by Frey to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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