biography

Over the course of her five-decade career, Viola Frey (1933–2004) produced an impressive body of artwork, including paintings, drawings, bronze and glass – but she is perhaps best known for her ceramic sculpture. Frey was obsessively devoted to her practice and produced thousands of artworks during her lifetime.

From early on, Frey was aware of the division between craft and fine art. When she enrolled at California College of Arts and Crafts in 1953, she majored in Painting, studying under Richard Diebenkorn, so she could be taken seriously as an artist. Ceramics was not considered a fine art at this time, yet she gravitated back to the Ceramics department, because, as she put it, it “had people of all ages in it. It seemed more like the real world. It was a community.”

As a result, Viola Frey shifted between two-dimensional and three-dimensional artworks with ease, and she often explored myriad themes simultaneously, all of which built her visual language. Her iconography included suited men, hands, and cast figurines, among many others. Plates served as a canvas, upon which she built narratives, and bricolage sculptures were assembled with molded objects from her figurine collection to create new meaning. Throughout her work, she used light, color, and scale to evoke emotion.

In 1984, Frey’s artwork was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which showcased larger-than-life figures alongside plates, bricolages, and paintings. Curator Patterson Sims wrote, “Clay has traditionally been associated with craft rather than with fine art in America, so that Viola Frey, who works primarily in ceramic, has not received full recognition as a serious sculptor and painter. In fact, clay is but one of the media Frey employs and it is only the starting point for her creative concerns….”

Viola Frey received her BFA and honorary doctorate from California College of the Arts and Crafts and attended graduate school at Tulane University. She was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Award of Honor in Sculpture from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and many other grants and awards.

Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2000, she co-founded the Artists’ Legacy Foundation with Squeak Carnwath and Gary Knecht. Upon her death in 2004, she became the Foundation’s first Legacy Artist.