Viola Frey

(Lodi, California, August 15, 1933 - July 26, 2004, Oakland, California)Frey received her BFA in 1956 from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA, and in 1958 received her MFA from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. In 1965 she became a part-time member of the CCAC faculty and in 1970 the full-time head of the ceramics department. Frey's larger-than-life sized figures achieve an impressive level of whimsy, given their imposing scale. They are menacing and playful at the same time. While they are often stiff in their gesture and expression, Frey's figures, with loose painterly and boisterously colorful surfaces, remain accessible, and akin to naive or folk art, though her sense of unrefined form and figuration is clearly deliberate. Often her richly colored surfaces serve to underscore the stiffness of their figures by way of bold black outlines filled in by outrageous coloring that makes her sculptures simultaneously two dimensional and three dimensional; they are paintings and sculptures all at once.