14 Facts About Viola Frey

Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts.

Viola Frey 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 received a BFA in 1956 from California College of Arts and Crafts, where she studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Vernon "Corky" Coykendall and Charles Fiske.

Viola Frey 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.

Viola Frey was well known for her monumental, brightly colored ceramic sculptures, which explored issues of gender, cultural iconography and art history.

Viola 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 Levi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind.

Viola Frey lived surrounded by art and a collection of approximately 4,000 art books.

Viola Frey joined the faculty at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1965, and continued a relationship with the college through 1999 as full professor and chair of the Ceramics Program.

Viola Frey was awarded the status of professor emerita in 1999, and the college established the Viola Frey Chair in Fine Arts in 2003.

Viola Frey's oeuvre is rich in iconography which she used to represent autobiographical, cultural and art history markers.

Viola Frey collected mass-produced figurines at local California flea markets, the images of which she used repeatedly in her career.

Viola Frey invented a family of unique stylized figures for her large-scale sculpture, paintings and pastels.

The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and an American Craft Council fellow, Viola Frey was presented with the Award of Honor in Sculpture from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Viola Frey was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine art from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland.