Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 16, 2024: Viola Frey, an American painter, sculptor, ceramist (#2025)

Viola Frey (1933 – 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.

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. 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 a leading figure in contemporary ceramics. She was well known for her monumental, brightly colored ceramic sculptures, which explored 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."

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.

In 1979, Viola was included in "A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878-1978", which Garth Clark co-organized with Margie Hughto for the Everson Museum of Art. In 1981, the Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired Double Grandmother. This led to her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1984, curated by Patterson Sims.

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. She died in Oakland, California, in 2004.

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