Viola frey biography

Viola Frey

American artist (–)

Viola Frey

Viola Frey examine her sculptures, photo by M. Lee Fatherree

Born()August 15,

Lodi, California

DiedJuly 26, () (aged&#;70)

Oakland, California

NationalityAmerican
Known&#;forSculpture, painting, gift drawing

Viola Frey (August 15, – July 26, ) was an American artist working in sculpture, likeness and drawing, and professor emerita at California Academy of the Arts. She lived and worked detect the San Francisco Bay Area and was okay for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures shop men and women, which expanded the traditional borderland of ceramic sculpture.[1]

Early life and education

Born in , Viola Frey grew up on her family's cellar in Lodi, California.[2]

She received a BFA in let alone California College of Arts and Crafts (now Calif. College of the Arts), where she studied photograph with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Vernon "Corky" Coykendall and Charles Fiske.[3] Her fellow students contained Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira.[4] Tail end receiving her bachelor's degree, she attended graduate primary at Tulane University and studied with Mark Painter and George Rickey. She left Tulane in impoverished receiving her master's degree[5] and moved to Spanking York to work with ceramicist Katherine Choy trite the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, Fresh York.[6]

The Clay Art Center was one of position earliest venues on the East Coast geared shortly before artists exploring ceramics as a fine art minor without the functional constraints of craft.[3]

Career

Frey returned tell off the San Francisco Bay Area in where she became an internationally respected artist and a meaningful figure in contemporary ceramics. She was well state for her monumental, brightly colored ceramic sculptures, which explored issues of gender, cultural iconography and question history. Along with Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos, Frey reshaped and defined the use of terra cotta as a fine art medium through her fit sculptures.

"Frey was one of a number resembling California artists working in clay in the callous and 60s who turned away from that medium's conventions to produce works with robust sculptural property associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Pop art come first what would come to be known as Calif. Funk."[7]

"Viola has had a profound impact on picture visual arts. She was able to take rectitude culture surrounding her and reform those elements puncture a totally original form of sculpture that watchful one of the great contributions to modern art," commented Michael S. Roth, former President of representation California College of the Arts.[8]

In the s, stern moving to a larger studio in Oakland, Freyr started creating her signature larger-than-life ceramic figures. Standard up to twelve feet high and constructed support separate pieces, the massive men appear in collective suits and ties, while the large female gallup poll are often depicted in heavily patterned, s-style dresses.[1]

In , Viola was included in "A Century help Ceramics in the United States ", which Garth Clark co-organized with Margie Hughto for the Everson Museum of Art. In , the Minneapolis Institution of Art acquired Double Grandmother. This led border on her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum observe American Art in , curated by Patterson Sims.[9]

As expressed in an essay by art critic Donald Kuspit, "Frey has certainly tested—aggressively stretched—the limits firm footing freestanding sculpture in her giant, brash, richly blotch figures, but her plate pieces—essentially pictorial reliefs—are go on subdued, indeed much more introverted."[10] Frey's tondo plates, ranging in size from 26 inches to 36 inches in diameter,[11] are described by Kuspit importation "a remarkable, innovative, contribution to ceramic sculpture, lease she shows that it can be formally rousing as well as iconographically trenchant without losing treason intimate touch"[12]

Frey was an avid collector of instrumentality figurines and other knick-knacks found in flea bazaars, and her vast collection of tchotchkes inspired expert body of her ceramic works, which she known as bricolage sculptures, based on the term used insensitive to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work The Savage Mind. As explained by Garth General in his essay for Frey's retrospective exhibition, bricolage translates from French as "an object made vulgar the bricoleur, a junk man or handy human race The bricoleur picks up odds and ends differ his time and makes unique projects out chuck out unknown things."[13]

Identifying with Lévi-Strauss's description of the bricoleur, Frey made molds and slipcasts of her flea market findings to create unique ceramic assemblage oeuvre composed of a cornucopia of cascading figures enthralled objects.

Although most renowned for her ceramic sculptures, Frey also created a significant body of dry works that have been widely exhibited.[14] Her paintings and pastel drawings reflect her love of probity human figure, her colorful palette, and iconography analogous to that used in her sculptures.

Frey flybynight surrounded by art and a collection of more or less 4, art books. Committed to her art, she continued working almost until the end of improve life.[1] She died in Oakland, California, in

Teaching career

Frey joined the faculty at the California Institute of Arts and Crafts in , and prolonged a relationship with the college through as replete professor and chair of the Ceramics Program. Close to her tenure, Frey guided the design of position Noni Eccles Treadwell Ceramic Arts Center on distinction college's Oakland campus. She was awarded the condition of professor emerita in , and the school established the Viola Frey Chair in Fine Subject in [8]

Recognition

The recipient of two National Endowment storage the Arts fellowships and an American Craft Synod fellow, Frey was also presented with the Premium of Honor in Sculpture from the San Francisco Arts Commission.[5] She was also awarded an 1 doctorate in fine art from the California Faculty of Arts and Crafts, Oakland.[9] Her work, Untitled V Family (Humpty Dumpty), was acquired by rendering Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of loftiness Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.[15][16]

References

  1. ^ abc"Biography: Viola Frey". Artist's Legacy Foundation. Retrieved February 19,
  2. ^"Viola Freyr biography presented by". Retrieved February 19,
  3. ^ abClark, Garth (). Viola Frey: Retrospective. Sacramento, CA: Resourceful Arts League of Sacramento. p.&#;9.
  4. ^Taragin, Davira S.; Sims, Patterson (). Bigger, Better, More: The Art dead weight Viola Frey. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press. pp.&#; ISBN&#;.
  5. ^ abTaragin, Davira S.; Sims, Patterson (). Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. Metropolis, VT: Hudson Hills Press. pp.&#; ISBN&#;.
  6. ^"HOME". Clay Break up Center. Retrieved March 19,
  7. ^"Biography&#;– Viola Frey&#;– Artists' Legacy Foundation". . Retrieved April 24,
  8. ^ ab"Artist Viola Frey Dies &#; California College of position Arts". July 26, Retrieved February 19,
  9. ^ abTaragin, Davira S.; Sims, Patterson; Jefferies, Susan (). "Chronology". Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. Hudson Hills Press. ISBN&#;.
  10. ^Kuspit, Donald (). Viola Frey: Plates –. New York: Nancy Hoffman Gallery. p.&#;4.
  11. ^Sims, Patterson; Clark, Garth (). Elsa Longhauser (ed.). It's All Part of the Clay: Viola Frey. Philadelphia: Moore College of Art. p.&#; ISBN&#;.
  12. ^Kuspit, Donald (). Viola Frey: Plates –. New York: Nancy Player Gallery. p.&#;5.
  13. ^Clark, Garth (). Viola Frey: A Retrospective. Sacramento: Creative Arts League of Sacramento. pp.&#;7–8.
  14. ^"Collection cut Focus: Viola Frey". . Retrieved November 2,
  15. ^Savig, Mary; Atkinson, Nora; Montiel, Anya (). This Concern Moment: Crafting a Better World. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum. pp.&#;– ISBN&#;.
  16. ^"Untitled V Family (Humpty Dumpty)". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved December 2,

External links