Viola Frey

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.

Early life and education Born in 1933, Viola Frey grew up on her family's vineyard in Lodi, California.

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.

"Viola has had a profound impact on the visual arts. She was able to take the culture surrounding 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. 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 knick-knacks 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 palette, and iconography similar to that used in her sculptures.

Frey lived surrounded by art and a collection of approximately 4,000 art books. Committed to her art, she continued working almost until the end of her life. Common figurines found throughout her artwork are the rooster, Venus de Milo, The Three Graces, Grecian urns, Wedgwood pottery, Asian figurines, articulated male and female toys, and a menagerie of animals. She also invented a family of unique stylized figures for her large-scale sculpture, paintings and pastels. These include men-in-suits, grandmothers, self-portraits and nude figures taken directly from life drawing sessions.

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. Her work, Untitled V Family (Humpty Dumpty), was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.

Legacy Near the end of her life, Frey partnered with artist Squeak Carnwath and her husband, Gary Knecht, to establish the Artists' Legacy Foundation. After her death in 2004, the foundation received her artwork, archives and reference materials, and funds to support the stewardship of her legacy. The Artists' Legacy Foundation also supports living artists through educational programs and the Artist Award.

Frey's life, work, and historical context has been more deeply explored in the publication Viola Frey: Artist's Mind/Studio/World, published in 2024. In a review of the book, art critic Sarah Hotchkiss explained its premise: "How do interior and exterior forces shape a life’s work — and what kind of thrilling slippage can take place between the mind, studio and world?"