GODS &MONSTERSARTWORK BY VIOLA FREY

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center

Washington, DC

Curated by Squeak Carnwath

GODS & MONSTERSARTWORK BY VIOLA FREY

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GODS & MONSTERS: The Early Work of Viola Frey

By Mark Van Proyen

Beginnings are delicate and hard to know, simply because there is always an earlier origin that pre-exists and bears upon any moment of presumed origination. As is the case with every artist’s career, this observation is borne out by the story of Viola Frey (1933–2004) as a painter and ceramic sculptor. Frey herself would say that she began her professional artistic career when she dug out the base-ment in her Divisadero home in San Francisco to house an art studio—four years after her return to California, and before that, four more years split between New Orleans and New York. But that beginning had its own complex pre-history reaching further back in time, and Frey’s pre-history is echoed and reflected in much of the work that she created up until her death in 2004, even after she suffered a series of debilitating strokes.

Viola Frey, Ming Blue and White, 1981. Oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0327WP. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Frey was born in 1933 and grew up on a family-run grape farm in Lodi, California. Following high school, she attended Stockton College, and then went on to the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) from 1953 to 1955, studying painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Charles Fiske and Vernon “Corky” Coykendall. After completing her BFA and at Coykendall’s behest, she entered the Graduate School at Tulane University to study art, but left just before finishing to join Tulane ceramics instructor Katherine Choy, to make experimental sculpture at Choy’s newly founded Clay Art Center at Port Chester, New York.1 Since the center was a commutable train journey to Manhattan and she needed employment to continue her artistic pursuits, Frey took a job in the business department of the Museum of Modern Art.

Here, we may want to remember a few things: first of which, Frey had ample exposure to legions of “organization men” clad in almost identical power suits, no doubt influencing her repeated use of the men-in-suits motif in later works. Second, her job at the museum also afforded first-hand familiarity with the masterworks in that museum’s collection—in particular, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907), and Girl Before a Mirror (1932)—echoes of which can be seen in many of Frey’s later figures executed in both two and three dimensions. The fact that Frey was there during the period of Peter Selz’s landmark 1959 exhibition, New Images of Man, is particularly relevant.2 In this exhibition were paintings by her former CCAC painting instructors Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira, hung alongside other works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and others—all of which were redolent with indications of psychological trauma and heavy existential emotion.

Frey cited several reasons for leaving New York and returning to California: the sudden untimely death of her friend Katherine Choy; the harsh New England winters; and the rise of figuration in the California Bay Area.3 Even in her school years, Frey showed an early interest in the figure, and she felt that San Francisco offered a more hospitable and sympathetic environment for figurative art than did the East Coast. So, in 1961, she took

an apartment at 495 Francisco Street, which was very close to the mediagenic heart of the Beatnik subculture that had gained international attention after the controversial reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at the Six Gallery in late 1955.

From 1961 to 1970, she worked in the billing department of Macy’s Department Store, and in 1964 Frey secured a part-time position at CCAC while also having some success exhibiting and occasionally selling her work. In 1963, she and Fiske rented a house at 1336 Divisadero, and in 1965, Frey purchased the house across the street (1335 Divisadero), where she and Fiske lived until 1975. It was here that Frey converted the basement to construct her first professional studio space, which was outfitted with a small kiln, allowing her to fire pottery and hand-built clay objects up to about 24 inches in any dimension. Having this dedicated space allowed her to work free of the distrac-tions that came along with using the communal studio at CCAC.

During the time that Frey and Fiske lived in the Divisadero neighborhood, they witnessed its rapid decline into a downward spiral of urban blight. Using money that Frey inher-ited after her father passed away, she bought a house in Oakland in 1974, where she and Fiske would live the rest of their lives.4 In the back yard of the Oakland home, Frey immediately set to work building a dedicated ceramic studio that, when finally finished in 1977, would become the place where she would embark upon the initial creation of her impressive series of life-sized polychrome figures—the most well-known being the almost life-size grandmothers (fig. 2).

Having Charles Fiske as a housemate was helpful in developing Frey’s early career. Curator Anita Ellis wrote, “Dealers soon noticed that to please Charles was to please Viola. Fiske became Viola’s de facto gatekeeper.” Fiske was a gay man almost two decades older than Frey, described as an “intellectual” and a “borderline genius mad-man.” In addition, the move to Oakland made sense as both he and Frey were teaching at CCAC (she part-time until 1970 and full time after that until her retirement in 1999; he intermittently from 1965 to 1998). It is easy to imagine that, for the purposes of social convenience, their cohabitation might have seemed to outside observers as being something akin to a conventional marriage.

Viola Frey in Port Chester, New York, c. 1958–1959. Viola Frey Archives, Artists’ Legacy Foundation.

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After gaining notoriety from her first retrospective organized by the Creative Arts League and initially exhibited at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and traveling to Oakland Museum in 1981, Frey again relocated her art studio to a large warehouse at 1089 Third Street in West Oakland, which afforded her the space to produce and store fig-urative ceramic sculpture that were much larger than life sized. This later body of sumptuously glazed and ebulliently colored work forms the basis of the international reputation that Frey’s work still enjoys, following in the wake of her highly successful survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1984. But it is the work that foreshadowed those later figures that is of interest here.

Many factors come to bear when we examine the sculpture that Frey created at the Divisadero studio during the decade beginning in 1965, and in the half-decade immediately after her departure from it. For convenience sake, we might point to several specific bodies of work, but in so doing, we need to recognize that in many cases, some of these are better understood as hybrid combinations of multiple tendencies. The earliest of these are several stoneware variations on the theme of plates and vessels, showing a penchant for subtle, minimally applied glazes that accentuate and reveal the earthen color and texture of clay—a very different approach to treating ceramic surfaces than the manner which

was used in the post-1977 figures. An early work, Untitled (Wall Hanging of Female Figure) (fig. 3), provides us with some additional clues, as it is among the earliest of Frey’s ceramic figurative works. It was designed to hang on a wall in the manner of a crucifix but is morphologically related to pre-Christian sources, those being Goddess figurines from the second, third and fourth millennia BCE, which we may now associate with Cycladic idols, or the Venus of Willendorf. During the 1970s, the archeological discover-ies of Marija Gimbutas gained the attention of popular media, illuminating her hypoth-esis of a widespread matriarchal culture existing in southeastern Europe thousands of years prior to the age of recorded history.5 This idea exerted a significant influence on many female American artists working in the 1970s (Nancy Spero, Judy Chicago, and

Figure 3. Viola Frey, Untitled (Wall Hanging of Female Figure), 1965. Ceramic and glazes, 15 3/4 x 10 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0063P. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Figure 2. Viola Frey, Untitled (Grandmother Series), 1978. Ceramic and glazes, 70 x 22 1/2 x 23 in. ALF no. VF-3109CS. Collection of di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Figure 1. Viola Frey, Dancing Monster Head, 1977. Ceramic and glazes, 25 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0107P. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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Ana Mendieta to name a few), and seems to have either directly or indirectly influ-enced Frey—possibly by way of the bookwormish Fiske.

Another kindred work from the Divisadero period is a rather frightening variation of a portrait bust titled A Visually Haunted Image (fig. 4), which shows a disfigured face that seems to have been violently removed from the front of a head and placed on a striped vessel fragment in the manner of some macabre trophy. Yet another work evoking Neolithic idolatry is titled Untitled (Desert Figure Model) (fig. 5). It seems to have been started as an abortive attempt to make a vessel of some kind, gaining new life as a male figure with a cylindrical head and no arms. It too is minimally glazed, featuring ominous dark circles around the figure’s empty eyes, suggesting a helpless anguish in the face of uncontrollable tragedy—possibly reflecting a distressed state of mind. Still another work that conveys a similar sense of trauma is Untitled (Female Figure Model) (fig. 6), showing an armless and legless female figure looking back at the viewer with a facial expression of terror and grief. An ominous torn hole is plainly visible at the figure’s lower abdomen, inviting a range of psychological interpretations pertaining to real or imagined violation.

Other works from this period include rather small works, treated with minimal glazing and almost all flirting with grotesque and occasionally terrifying attri-butes, are central in a series of photographs also taken during the 1970s. The photographs are from the period when her Oakland ceramic studio was under construction, and they show small, quickly improvised figures and figure group-ings, sometimes positioned inside of what appears to be a bird cage, providing a surrounding grid, suggesting that those works may have been intended to be trial sketches or maquettes that could later be proportionally scaled-up into larger productions.

In any event, we can note that many of Frey’s early works from the 1969 to 1977 period reach back to the pre-historical point where it is impossible to distinguish between sculpture and ritual objects, carrying intimations of the joys and terrors that haunt the world of tribal peoples or very young children, simply and eloquently

Figure 5. Viola Frey, Untitled (Desert Figure Model), 1974. Ceramic and slip, 15 1/2 x 4 x 3 in. ALF no. VF-0075CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. Opposite: Figure 4. Viola Frey, A Visually Haunting Image, 1968. Ceramic, glazes, and silver leaf, 14 1/2 x 15 x 15 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0220CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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In 1967, Peter Selz organized another exhibition that would have a consequential effect on Frey’s subsequent artistic development. The exhibition, titled Funk, was installed at Berkeley Art Museum and featured the work of 26 Bay Area artists, almost all of whom were of the same general age as Frey. Frey herself was not included, but the exhi-bition did bring international attention to Northern California art, defining what turned out to be a prominent regional style that emphasized an irrev-erent, ironic, and zany approach to the relations of materials and the meanings inherent to them.

Selz’s Funk exhibition also featured ceramic sculp-ture by Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson, among others; these two named artists being influential colleagues during this period. In fact, the Funk exhibition represented the precise moment when clay had at long last achieved full legitimation as a medium for sculpture, providing serviceable grist for Selz’s assertion of a “hot” anti-minimal-ist esthetic elaborating and expanding on surre-alist principles representing the preferable path for the future of American art. As Selz wrote, “the imagery, the attitude, the feeling remains funky just the same: the same attitude of irony and wit,

the delight in the visual pun, the same spirit of irreverence and absurdity prevail, even when dexterity and careful workmanship are more apparent.”8 To put it another way, it was the implicit mutability of materials such as clay or paint that was upheld to be their essential characteristic, forcing attention away from the radically anti-subjectivist proc-lamations of Minimalism’s “essential” conjugations of cold situation and sheer materi-ality. In so doing, Funk refocused attention on the attributes of the artist’s personality as

located in the interstitial space between archaic impulse and worldly recognition. They bespeak an emphasis on the haptic side of the hap-tic-visual continuum, experienced at the point of where infantile sen-sation initially re-forms itself into world-awareness, that being the same point where fetish objects could be thought to have magical capacities for influencing an uncontrollable world.6 More obliquely, they also bespeak the emotional temperature of many of the works that were exhibited in Selz’s New Images of Man exhibition, testifying to their lingering influence.

The armless male figure motif turns up again in a work titled Father Doll (Shadow Box Figure) (fig. 7), which is shown as part of a quartet of wall sculptures recalling Voodoo dolls. In this example, it is given a necktie, work boots, and blue denim pants with upturned cuffs, no doubt reflecting recollections of Frey’s earlier life growing up on a California farm, and quite possibly echoing a memory of her father, with whom she seemed to have had a troubled relationship.7 In the case of a later Untitled (Oval Head, Hat, Leaf Hands) (fig. 8), we might also detect the distant presence of Frey’s paternal grandmother, who, as the domineering matriarch ran the family’s grape farming business, was an important figure in her life, casting Frey’s father as a subordinate ranch hand who filled his time amassing a large collection of odd bits of machinery. No doubt, from her grandmother, Frey learned the basics of keeping financial records, thereby devel-oping a marketable skill by which she could earn a living during an era when it was very difficult for any woman to be financially inde-pendent from the male domination of the workforce. But from her father, Frey inherited the collecting habit, only in her case it was for mass-produced ceramic figurines that she acquired from her regular visits to the Alameda flea market. Over the years, Frey would amass hundreds of these figurines, and these played important roles in the development of her work, both as material and as subject matter.

Figure 7. Viola Frey, Father Doll, Shadow Box Figures Series, 1977. Ceramic and glazes, 23 1/2 x 9 x 6 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0327CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Figure 8. Viola Frey, Untitled (Oval Head, Hat, Leaf Hands), 1979. Ceramic and glazes, 60 1/2 x 25 x 14 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0448CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Figure 6. Viola Frey, Untitled (Female Figure Model), 1975–1976. Ceramic and slip, 10 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 6 in. ALF no. VF-0204CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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representing another kind of material that could be put into artistic motion, working with the possibilities of a libidinous play with abject materials and perverse significations.

The wide-ranging influence of the Funk exhibition is felt to greater or lesser extent in many of Frey’s works from the 1969–1982 years, but amid that influence there can be found a multiplicity of variations. Several of these take the form of Surrealistic juxtapo-sitions of improbable elements, as is the case with Grandmother’s Teacup (fig. 9), which shows a topsy-turvy arrangement of various elements such as a Japanese fan and a reclining angel. Only instead of using them as found objects, Frey worked with ceramic slip-casts of the objects, and subsequently conjoined and treated them with layered glazes. It is worth noting that, during those years, Frey became ever more adventurous in the way that she applied glazes and other surface treatments to her work, developing an evermore complex vocabulary of underglazes, overglazes, and china painting. When these works are examined as a chronological group, we can see the steady, step-by-step development toward greater complexity and sophistication.

Perhaps the most intensely personal works from this period are a pair of paintings called Untitled (Construction with Monster Face, Horse on Ledge) (c. 1979–1981), and Untitled (Construction with Monster Face, Figurines) (fig. 10), both of which are executed in thick oil paint on the backside of premade canvas supports. At first glance, they look like a chaotic painter’s palette: a layered amalgamation of thick pigment, some muted and some stunningly colorful. But in both cases, closer inspection reveals the presence of an anguished face, a veritable howl of fear and pain emerging from a cloud of visual chaos that threatens to devour some adjacent figurines. Similar faces are revealed on the surfaces of large plates that Frey made in later years (1977–1982), which can be most profitably understood as pictorial reliefs executed on tondo surfaces—the earlier ones revealing minimal glazing while later examples sporting more elaborate surface treatments.

One body of sculptures from 1979, The Phobia Series, most clearly bespeaks the influ-ence of Funk esthetics on Frey’s work. At a cursory glance, they seem like fantasies on the theme of indoor plumbing gone horribly awry, primarily white with yellow and black

Figure 9. Viola Frey, Grandmother’s Teacup, 1978. Ceramic and glazes, 25 x 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 in. without base. ALF no. VF-0012CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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accents that articulate cartoonish faces express-ing startled emotions. In some ways, these works refer back to the monstrous emotionalism of earlier works, but they also bring a mordant humor into the equation, inviting the Nietzschean observation pertaining to life being a tragedy for those that feel and a comedy for those that think. They also seem to bear some relation to some of the scatological work that Arneson had exhibited a few years earlier, even though he had gone on to make variations on the theme of self-portraits by that point. Concurrently in the late 1970s, Frey was starting to explore quasi-realistic portraiture in her Grandmother series, which turned out to be the pivotal works that led to her heroically scaled figures.

Frey’s longstanding enthusiasm for collecting small figurines found its own voice in other sculptural work called bricolages, or junk sculptures, which she began making from about 1977 and continued until the time of her death. These bricolages become elaborate amalgama-tions of glazed slip-casts of the small figurines attached to other hand-built objects, usually utilizing several layers of surface treatments. In Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Fan Nose and Elbow on Pitcher) (fig. 11), in another nod to Picasso, a Cubist face seems to be devouring the upper part of an ambiguously gendered figure, which is being pushed up by large arms tipped with casts of the artist’s hands. Near the base, we see a small pitcher set atop what seems to be a chamber pot, while the upper part of the face is formed from fragments from

other figurines. In the case of both of these works, there is a variety of richly colored glazes emphasizing a painterly consideration of sculptural form. Again, the emphasis on manic amalgamation and surrealist juxtaposition is revealed, both being attributes that echoed the improvisatory esthetics of the Funk movement.

Gradually, as Frey’s work attained greater thresholds of public acclaim, the intensely personal “haptic” aspects of her work become less visible, but they never completely vanish. Rather, they are strategically submerged, muted, and sublimated, always lurking below the works’ lustrous surfaces, but never so far as to be unseen. This was certainly true in what could be called her “realist/surrealist” phase (roughly 1975–1983, including her grandmother and bricolage sculptures), where haptic operations were balanced with a new emphasis on clear visual detail, formal complexity, and imaginative elaboration.

It must be stated that Frey would dispute some or all of these assertions, and in fact she has done so by consistently re-emphasizing in her autobi-ographical sources and various recorded interviews.9 Nonetheless, the unavoidable fact is that, to make heroically scaled figurative sculpture is to invoke a classical tradition reaching back to the Greek golden age—even if the effort is only to mock or undermine it, or to use it as a point of departure—artistic avow-als notwithstanding. However, an important part of invoking Frey’s legacy is to also invoke an understand-ing of her own pre-history, represented by the kind of archaic, pre-Dorian figurative sculpture of which served as an initial, “magical” germination.

Figure 11. Viola Frey, Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Fan Nose and Elbow on Pitcher), c. 1981. Ceramic and glazes, 38 x 18 x 15 in. ALF no. VF-0603CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Figure 10. Viola Frey, Untitled (Construction with Monster Face, Figurines), c. 1979–1981. Mixed media, 29 1/2 x 18 x 5 in. ALF no. VF-0185PT. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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We also have to note that the autobiographical aspects of Frey’s work are never far from their symbolic surfaces, and they are almost always given pride of place in the extant literature about her career. But the important point is that, before autobiography we have psychobiography, and the early work in this exhibition reveals a deep psycholog-ical narrative of anguish, doubt, and longing, thus exerting a latent gravitational pull on the later work, as manifested by the revelation of an awkward paralysis of affect, as revealed by the later figures’ quizzical and palsied stoicism. Very often, the best exam-ples of the later works reach through and beyond autobiographical references, refresh-ing, and animating what it means to represent a fully embodied human figure in all of its contradictory self-doubt. We should always remember that the creation of Frey’s heroically scaled figures was undertaken as a result of her pre-history beginnings, in a mass-mediated world where the conditions of selfhood so dramatically represented by them, are set against overwhelming forces of social regimentation, encouraging psychological disembodiment at every turn.

Endnotes

1. My primary source for information about biographical details for Viola Frey and Charles Fiske’s life is Anita J. Ellis, Viola Frey: The Fine Art of Ceramic Sculpture (Unpublished Manuscript, 2007, courtesy of Artists’ Legacy Foundation, all rights reserved). All biographical refer-ences are from this source, unless otherwise noted. In that text, Neil Williams is quoted as saying “We all know that Charles (Fiske) was the suited man.” (p. 23).

2. See Peter Selz, New Images of Man (Museum of Modern Art, 1959). At the point of Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956, and in the context of the Red Scare of the 1950s, many in the New York art world were asking the question pertaining to what would happen after Abstract Expressionism had run its course. Selz’s exhibition was an attempt to answer that question through the optics of then-popular existential-ist philosophy and his own long-standing interest in pre-war German Expressionism. But as the history of the ensuing decade demon-strated, it was Pop Art that would end up answering that question. Nonetheless, the exhibition did make a compelling and controversial case for the resurgent importance of figuration at the end of the Abstract Expressionist 1950s.

3. Regarding Choy’s death, Frey was quoted as saying: “So she had a full-fledged wedding, Chinese/Caucasian. And then she had a full-fledged funeral, Chinese/Caucasian. And we all felt that it was suicide, because by that time they were living apart. She told me, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ She said, ‘It’s just so boring just to sit in a room and just stare at each other.’” She was talking about her husband. And so Dr. Koo, who was a well-known Chinese scholar in New York City, told me, he said, ‘Well, at least we saved one of them.’” (Quoted in Paul J. Karlstrom, Oral History interview with Viola Frey, Archives of American Art, 1995.

4. See Davira Taragin’s essay, “Viola Frey: Everything is Autobiographical,” in Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey, (Racine, WI: Racine Art Museum, 2009).

5. See Gimbutas, Op. Cit. 13. “European civilization between 6500 and 3500 BC was not a provincial reflection of Near Eastern civilization… but had developed independent agricultural economies prior to the Kurgan invasions of the 4th millennium (BCE).” Amongst the archeological evidence of these “Old Europe” cultures, we can take note of a great many small figurines made of fired clay and carved stone, almost all female: “The ‘Fertility Goddess’ or ‘Mother Goddess’ is a more complex image than most people think. It was not only the Mother Goddess who commands fertility, or the Lady of The Beasts who governs the fecundity of animals and all wild nature, or the frightening Mother Terrible, but a composite image with traits accumulated from both pre-agricultural and agricultural eras… She was the giver of life and at the same time she was the wielder of the destructive power of nature, like the moon is light as well as dark.” Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 152.

6. The haptic/visual scale is at the core of an influential theory of art education originally published in 1947 by Viktor Lowenfeld and W. Lambert Britten titled Creative and Mental Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1965. 267.): “Visual Space, for which our eyes are the intermedi-aries, we perceive as the widest space. Haptic space, for which our organs of touch and our bodily sensations are the intermediaries, is the most restricted. Both spaces achieve a magical significance whenever the self is included within them through value judgments.” It is of interest that this passage is from a chapter titled “The Period of Decision: The Crisis of Adolescence.”

7. “Father really only cared about machinery and growing things…he liked strangers better than people who knew him too well.” (Frey quoted in Lesley Wenger, “Viola Frey Interview,” Currants 1, August 1975. 38.) She also remembers an awkward moment at her father’s 1973 funeral, when she and Fiske were not allowed to sit in the back of the church and were instead pressured to sit with the rest of the family. (see Fiske papers archive, courtesy of Artists’ Legacy Foundation). For additional background on Frey’s early family experiences, see Garth Clark, “Cracks in the Sidewalk: A Chronological Study of the Art and World of Viola Frey.” In Viola Frey Retrospective, (Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum, 1981).

8. Peter Selz, “Notes on Funk,” in Funk (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1967), 6.9. See Clark, Op.Cit. 9. “…Frey was asked about scale in her work, particularly the figures. The questioner assumed heroic intent, but Frey

explained that her height was almost exactly that of the grapevines and so, for the first sixteen years of her life on the farm, she saw little more than the first row of vines. Many of her pieces, therefore, were not searching for monumental scale, but were simply trying, metaphorically at least, to gaze over and beyond the grapevines.”

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Viola Frey, Untitled (Figure with Raised Arms), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 16 1/2 x 8 x 7 in. ALF no. VF-0343CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. Opposite: Viola Frey, Untitled (Small Pitcher with Face), c. 1978–1979. Ceramic and slip, 2 3/4 x 6 3/4 x 3 3/4 in. ALF no. VF-0125CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Viola Frey, Untitled (Smiling Vessel Face), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 7 x 12 x 12 in. ALF no. VF-0335CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree. Opposite: Viola Frey, Untitled (Vessel, Hand, Head), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 13 x 13 x 11 in. ALF no. VF-0339CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Viola Frey, Untitled (Frowning Vessel Face), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 11 1/2 x 12 x 6 in. ALF no. VF-0337CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Clockwise (from top left): Viola Frey, Untitled (Bear Head), 1976. Ceramic and slip, 6 3/4 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0634CSS; Untitled (Face), c. 1975–1977. Ceramic and slip, 4 x 8 x 9 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0094CSS; Untitled (Amorphous Collapsed Pot with Face), c. 1975–1977. Ceramic and slip, 5 x 9 x 8 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0131CSS; Untitled (Small Abstract Desert Face with Horns), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic, 5 1/4 x 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 in. ALF no. VF-0365CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. All photographed by M. Lee Fatherree. Opposite: Viola Frey, Untitled (Animal Personage Model), 1975. Ceramic and slip, 12 x 6 x 5 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0076CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Viola Frey, Untitled (Bust with Gray Hat), c. 1974–1976. Ceramic and glazes, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 6 in. ALF no. VF-0124CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Viola Frey, Untitled (Head in Hat), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 12 x 9 x 8 in. ALF no. VF-0346CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Viola Frey, Phobia: Monster Head Don’t Shout, 1979. Ceramic and glazes, 25 x 14 x 12 in. ALF no. VF-0320CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Viola Frey, Phobia: Monster Head Don’t Die Yet, 1979. Ceramic and glazes, 25 x 14 x 12 in. ALF no. VF-0319CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Viola Frey, Untitled (Phobia with Hands to Mouth), 1979. Ceramic and glazes, 26 x 15 x 12 in. ALF no. VF-0309CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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Viola Frey, Fundamentally Undomesticated Reconstruction, c. 1977–1980. Ceramic and glazes, 73 x 24 x 32 in. ALF no. VF-0039CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Viola Frey, Goggle Eyes, 1979–1980. Ceramic and glazes, 30 x 13 1/2 x 14 in. ALF no. VF-0027CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Viola Frey, Untitled (Blue Hands, Hat of Figurines), Greedy Grandmother Series, 1980. Oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0330WP. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Viola Frey, Untitled (White Face, Black Hand and Eye), 1980. Oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0333WP. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

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Viola Frey, Doll on Grid #9, Shadow Box Figures Series, 1976–1977. Ceramic and glazes, 28 1/2 x 18 x 5 in. ALF no. VF-0325CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Clockwise (from top left): Viola Frey, Untitled (Slide 345), 1975, scanned 35mm slide; Untitled (Slide 139), 1975 scanned 35mm slide; Untitled (Slide 341), 1975, scanned 35mm slide; Untitled (Slide 361), 1975, scanned 35mm slide; Untitled (Slide 355), 1975, scanned 35mm slide; Untitled (Slide 344), 1975, scanned 35mm slide. Viola Frey Archives, Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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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 (CCAC) in 1953, she majored in painting, studying under Richard Diebenkorn, so she could be taken seri-ously as an artist. Ceramics was not considered a fine art at this time, yet she gravitated 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-dimen-sional 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 paint-ings. 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

VIOLA FREYBIOGRAPHY

Opposite: Viola Frey with flea market finds, drawings, and sculptures in her Oakland Avenue painting and drawing studio, Oakland, California, 1980. Photograph by Kurt Edward Fishback.

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Grandmother’s Teacup, 1978, ceramic and glazes, 25 x 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches without base, ALF no. VF-0012CSS.

Goggle Eyes, 1979–1980, ceramic and glazes, 30 x 13 1/2 x 14 inches without base, ALF no. VF-0027CSS.

Fundamentally Undomesticated Reconstruction, c. 1977–1980, ceramic and glazes, 73 x 24 x 32 inches, ALF no. VF-0039CSS.

Untitled (Desert Figure Model), 1974, ceramic and slip, 15 1/2 x 4 x 3 inches, ALF no. VF-0075CSS.

Untitled (Animal Personage Model), 1975, ceramic and slip, 12 x 6 x 5 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0076CSS.

Untitled (Desert Figure Model), 1975, ceramic and slip, 14 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 5 inches, ALF no. VF-0077CSS.

Untitled (Face), c. 1975–1977, ceramic and slip, 4 x 8 x 9 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0094CSS.

Dancing Monster Head, 1977, ceramic and glazes, 25 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0107P.

Untitled (Horse with Hand), 1980, ceramic and glazes, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0119P.

Untitled (Bust with Gray Hat), c. 1974–1976, ceramic and glazes, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 6 inches, ALF no. VF-0124CSS.

Untitled (Small Pitcher with Face), c. 1978–1979, ceramic and slip, 2 3/4 x 6 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0125CSS.

Untitled (Amorphous Collapsed Pot with Face), c. 1975–1977, ceramic and slip, 5 x 9 x 8 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0131CSS.

Doll on Grid #11, Shadow Box Figures Series, 1977, ceramic and glazes, 5 3/4 x 19 1/2 x 25 inches, ALF no. VF-0143CSS.

Untitled (Dragon and Half Moon), 1982, ceramic and glazes, 25 x 25 x 4 inches, ALF no. VF-0156P.

Untitled (White Oval Head and White Gloves), 1979, ceramic and glazes, 24 3/4 x 24 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0159P.

Untitled (Rabbit Head), 1977, ceramic and glazes, 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 x 3 1/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0177P.

Untitled (Construction with Monster Face, Figurines), c. 1979–1981, mixed media, 29 1/2 x 18 x 5 inches, ALF no. VF-0185PT.

Untitled (Construction with Monster Face, Horse on Ledge), c. 1979–1981, mixed media, 19 x 12 x 3/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0186PT.

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 cre-ative concerns….”

Viola Frey received her BFA and honor-ary doctorate from California College of the Arts and Crafts and attended gradu-ate 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 pri-vate collections worldwide, 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’ Leg-acy Foundation with Squeak Carnwath and Gary Knecht. Upon her death in 2004, she became the Foundation’s first Legacy Artist.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

Ceramic sculptures on view outside Viola Frey’s Oakland Avenue studio, Oakland, CA, c. 1980–1983.

All artworks lent by the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

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Untitled (Female Figure Model), 1975–1976, ceramic, 10 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 6 inches, ALF no. VF-0204CSS.

Untitled (Standing Figure with Hat, Model), 1975–1976, ceramic and slip, 13 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0205CSS.

Untitled (Small Head with Loop), 1975–1976, ceramic, slip and glazes, 6 x 4 1/4 x 4 inches, ALF no. VF-0239CSS.

Untitled (Small Head), Desert Toys Series, 1975, ceramic, slip and glazes, 7 x 6 x 6 inches, ALF no. VF-0250CSS.

Untitled (White Monster Face on Blue), 1979–1981, ceramic and glazes, 20 1/4 x 20 3/4 x 3 inches, ALF no. VF-0270P.

Untitled (Phobia with Hands to Mouth), 1979, ceramic and glazes, 26 x 15 x 12 inches, ALF no. VF-0309CSS.

Untitled (Male Doll with Blue Hat), 1977, ceramic and glazes, 21 x 9 x 5 inches, ALF no. VF-0316CSS.

Phobia: Monster Head Don’t Die Yet, 1979, ceramic and glazes, 25 x 14 x 12 inches, ALF no. VF-0319CSS.

Phobia: Monster Head Don’t Shout, 1979, ceramic and glazes, 25 x 14 x 12 inches, ALF no. VF-0320CSS.

Doll on Grid #9, Shadow Box Figures Series, 1976–1977, ceramic and glazes, 28 1/2 x 18 x 5 inches, ALF no. VF-0325CSS.

Father Doll, Shadow Box Figures Series, 1977, ceramic and glazes, 23 1/2 x 9 x 6 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0327CSS.

Ming Blue and White, 1981, oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0327WP.

Untitled (Blue Hands, Hat of Figurines), Greedy Grandmother Series, 1980, oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0330WP.

Untitled (Head, Funnel, Ball), Desert Toys Series, 1975, ceramic, slip and glazes, 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 5 inches, ALF no. VF-0332CSS.

Untitled (White Face, Black Hand and Eye), 1980, oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0333WP.

Untitled (Smiling Vessel Face), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 7 x 12 x 12 inches, ALF no. VF-0335CSS.

Untitled (Frowning Vessel Face), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 11 1/2 x 12 x 6 inches, ALF no. VF-0337CSS.

Untitled (Vessel, Hand, Head), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 13 x 13 x 11 inches, ALF no. VF-0339CSS.

Untitled (Three Heads, Snake in Dish), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 15 x 9 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0340CSS.

Untitled (Figure with Raised Arms), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 16 1/2 x 8 x 7 inches, ALF no. VF-0343CSS.

Untitled (Head in Hat), c. 1975–1980, ceramic and slip, 12 x 9 x 8 inches, ALF no. VF-0346CSS.

Untitled (Small Abstract Desert Face with Horns), c. 1975–1980, ceramic, 5 1/4 x 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches, ALF no. VF-0365CSS.

Untitled (Oval Head, Hat, Leaf Hands), 1979, ceramic and glazes, 60 1/2 x 25 x 14 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0448CSS.

Untitled (The Traveler), 1980, whiteware and glazes, 64 x 30 x 18 inches, ALF no. VF-0453CSS.

Untitled (Head in Ring), 1975, ceramic, slip and glazes, 4 3/4 x 6 x 6 inches, ALF no. VF-0586CSS.

Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Fan Nose and Elbow on Pitcher), c. 1981, ceramic and glazes, 38 x 18 x 15 inches without base, ALF no. VF-0603CSS.

Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Hands to Mouth), c. 1980–1983, ceramic and glazes, 41 x 15 x 14 inches without base, ALF no. VF-0609CSS.

Untitled (Bear Head), 1976, ceramic and slip, 6 3/4 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, ALF no. VF-0634CSS.

Untitled (Slide 110), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 3 1/2 x 5 inches, ALF no. VFA-9004PH.

Untitled (Slide 361), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9005PH.

Untitled (Slide 139), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9006PH.

Untitled (Slide 344), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9007PH.

Untitled (Slide 345), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9008PH.

Untitled (Slide 355), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9009PH.

Untitled (Slide 341), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9010PH.

Untitled (Slide 279), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9012PH.

Untitled (Slide 194), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9015PH.

Untitled (Slide 203), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 3 1/2 x 5 inches, ALF no. VFA-9018PH.

Untitled (Slide 183), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 3 1/2 x 5 inches, ALF no. VFA-9019PH.

Untitled (Slide 289), 1975, reprinted 2020, giclee print, 5 x 3 1/2 inches, ALF no. VFA-9020PH.

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4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016

First published in conjunction with the planned exhibition Gods & MonstersScheduled April 4–May 24, 2020American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Washington, DC

American University Museum Sharon Christiansen, Manager, Museum Operations & Visitor ServicesElizabeth Cowgill, Marketing & Publications SpecialistCarla Galfano, RegistrarSarah Leary, Museum Operations AssistantJessica Pochesci, Assistant RegistrarJack Rasmussen, Director & CuratorKevin Runyon, Preparator Kristi-Anne Shaer, Associate Director

Curated by Squeak Carnwath Edited by Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CADesign by Lloyd Greenberg Design, LLC

Catalog © The American University MuseumISBN: 978-1-7334166-9-6Original essay 2019 © Mark Van ProyenViola Frey artworks © Artists’ Legacy Foundation / Licensed by ARS, New York.

Cover: Viola Frey, Untitled (Animal Personage Model), 1975. Ceramic and slip, 12 x 6 x 5 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0076CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Inside cover: Viola Frey, Untitled (Three Heads, Snake in Dish), c. 1975–1980. Ceramic and slip, 15 x 9 x 3 1/2 in. ALF no. VF-0340CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree.

Back cover (clockwise from top left): Viola Frey, Untitled (White Oval Head and White Gloves), 1979. Ceramic and glazes, 24 3/4 x 24 3/4 x 3 1/4 in. ALF no. VF-0159P; Untitled (White Monster Face on Blue), 1979–1981. Ceramic and glazes, 20 1/4 x 20 3/4 x 3 in. ALF no. VF-0270P; Untitled (Dragon and Half Moon), 1982. Ceramic and glazes, 25 x 25 x 4 in. ALF no. VF-0156P; Untitled (Horse with Hand), 1980. Ceramic and glazes, 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 2 3/4 in. ALF no. 0119P. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.

Opposite: Viola Frey, Untitled (The Traveler), 1980. Whiteware and glazes, 64 x 30 x 18 in. ALF no. VF-0453CSS. Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, CA.