Viola Frey, 1933-2004

Viola Frey was a star of the California art scene for three decades. She used ceramic pottery techniques to create monumental human figures with a funky, unpretentious look. She was also a popular educator and community figure in Oakland.

When Viola started making sculpture in the 1960s, the art community in the Bay Area was charged with creative energy. The big new idea in sculpture was that ceramics could be used to create works of art, instead of merely utilitarian tableware. In prior decades, terra cotta had been used for busts and other small pieces, but California sculptors were using ceramic techniques—including firing and glazing—to create representational figures.

The second big idea of the time was Funk: it was okay for art to be comical, antic, ironic and junky. This is a pretty radical thought—artists had traditionally striven toward excellence and refinement—and it hasn't spread much beyond California. Funky ceramic sculpture is very friendly and unassuming, comfortable with its own crudeness. Here's an example by the most famous sculptor to use ceramic.

Robert Arneson
California Artist, 1982
SFMOMA / Jan's photo

The third trend energizing the art scene in the Bay Area was figuration. In the elite world of New York art, realism and the figure were considered passé. Everyone was into some sort of abstraction or minimalism that referred only to itself, where design drove out content. Californians wanted their art to treat the actual world they lived in, the things and people of daily life.

With extensive training in traditional ceramics, and having studied ceramics as an art-form in a pioneering art school on the east cast, Viola was an important leader in the development of funky, figurative ceramics. Her most famous works were over-size figures of people from her childhood—not particular people so much as types. Their postures and expressions seem stiff and puzzling, but their surface is a riot of expressionist brushwork. Using clay figures as a background for expressionistic painting was one of Viola's unique innovations.

Background: A native Californian, Viola grew up on her family's vineyard in Lodi, California. It would be interesting to know something about her family and how she got interested in art.

Training: After high school, Viola attended college in nearby Stockton, but she soon got a scholarship to attend the California College of Arts and Crafts, from which she received a BFA in 1956.

After that Viola enrolled in graduate school at Tulane University in New Orleans, but she soon dropped out in order to attend a new school for clay arts in Port Chester, New York, one of the earliest venues on the East Coast geared toward exploring ceramics as a fine art medium without the functional constraints of craft.


Personal life: One of Viola's instructors in ceramics at CCAC, Charles Fiske, strongly supported her work and became her life partner. Viola lived and worked in Oakland, moving a few times to get more studio and storage space. Viola died at the age of 71 in Oakland, California, in 2004.

Career: For the first decade and more of her career, Viola had a day job to support herself. While she was at school in New York, she worked in the business office of the Museum of Modern Art. After she settled in the Bay Area, Viola worked in the accounting department of Macy's from 1960 to 1970.

Viola got her start as an artist in 1965 when she was hired as Artist Potter in Residence by California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, her alma mater.  By 1971 she was a full-time assistant professor in the Ceramics Department, and she was able to quit her day job. Soon she was able to buy her own home in Oakland, which had a large studio space.

Viola's sculptures started growing taller, sometimes reaching nearly 12 feet. It was unprecedented to use clay for monumental works, and it required her to develop whole new techniques. Sculptures were built and fired in segments of a size she or her assistant could lift, and the segments were pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Their gigantic size reduces the viewer to the size of a pre-teen, lost in a wilderness of huge, inscrutable adults.

Throughout her career—from the 1970s through the 1990s—Viola exhibited regularly, traveled the world to expand her art practice, and received numerous awards.

Examples

Pink Lady,  1965
Oakland / Jan's photo 2014

Double Self, 1978
Ceramic and glaze, life-size
violafrey.org

Man Observing II, 1984
de Young / Jan's photo, 2017

Homage, 1985-1987
ceramic and glazes / about 8 feet long
di Rosa / violafrey.org

Ethnic Man, 1991
Utah / Jan's photo, 2013

Falling Man in Suit, 1991
Internet

The World and The Woman, 1992
ceramic and glazes
almost 12 feet long
violafrey.org

American Nude Series (Woman with Elbow on Raise Knee), 1994
Glazed ceramic
OMCA
Photo by Dan L. Smith, 2010

Family Portrait, 1995
ceramic and glazes
About 7' x 7'
violafrey.org

World Civilization, 1999
SFO Museum, Boarding Area A / from their website

Internet grab

Jay DeFeo,1929-1989

Jay DeFeo was a visual artist who worked in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1950-1989. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make her a unique figure.

At the outset of her career in the 1950s, Jay was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco.

Her masterpiece, and her most famous work, called The Rose, was created between 1958 and 1964, but Jay created an astoundingly diverse range of works.

Background: Jay DeFeo was born in 1929 in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her mother was a nurse from an Austrian immigrant family, and her father was an Italian-American medical student. In 1932, the family moved to the Bay Area, and her father enrolled in medical school. The marriage was troubled, and Jay was bounced between her parents and grandparents—and even institutional care— during her early childhood. After Jay's parents divorced in 1939—she was 10—she lived with her mother in San Jose, CA.

Training: She received a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a master’s in 1951, both in studio art, from the University of California, Berkeley. Upon graduation, she was awarded a fellowship and traveled to Europe and North Africa for a year and a half, settling in Florence for six months.

Private life: In 1954, Jay married an art student named Wally Hedrick. They shared a building on Fillmore Street with other artists that became a hangout for writers and jazz musicians.

She was 29 years old in 1958 when she started The Rose. It is reported that for the next eight years, she did little else but sit on a stool in her studio, smoking cigarettes and drinking brandy while she painted and scraped away at her vision. She didn't stop working on it until 1966 when she was evicted from the building on Fillmore. By then her health was depleted and her marriage was on the rocks.  Jay and Wally divorced in 1969, and Jay moved to Marin County. There she began a 13-year relationship with a younger man.

In 1981 she moved from Marin to Oakland, after accepting a position at Mills College.

She died on November 11, 1989, at the age of 60.

Career: Jay created her first significant body of work in Florence: over 200 small paintings. She returned to Berkeley in 1952. She was strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism.

In the 1950s, Jay was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco. She supported herself by making and selling jewelry. 

Between 1956 and 1960, Jay made several large paintings, most exceeding 10 feet in height. She liked to apply the paint thickly with a palette knife. Her paint was like thick wet dirt; she said it resembled "mud pies."

In 1958, Jay began work on “an idea that had a center to it." Roughly 11-by-8 feet, it covered a bay window. Since she eventually called the painting The Rose, Jay’s placement of it was likely inspired by the rose windows in Gothic churches, such as the Notre Dame in Paris. Working with palette knives and masonry trowels, she slathered thick layers of mostly white and dark gray paint onto her canvas. She used the same tools to carve away at the growing relief as it dried, building the paint into canyon-like formations arranged around a center point, like a starburst. She added mica chips to the paint, giving it an interior light. When Jay finally gave it up, 8 years later, the work was 8-11 inches thick in some places, and it weighed 1800 pounds. The paradoxical impact of the painting: an immaterial and evanescent starburst seems to be embedded in a massive slab of stone—a recent critic called it a "fossil of light."

Its existence quickly became a local legend.

The Rose was first exhibited in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum and San Francisco. It then languished unseen behind a protective wall at the San Francisco Art Institue for 25 years. In 1994 The Whitney Museum of American Art brought it out of storage and restored it. The Whitney has since featured it in several exhibits.

While she was working on The Rose, Jay essentially withdrew from the art world, turning down offers of new gallery affiliations and solo exhibitions. When she finished it, she took a break from the art world for a few years in order to recover her mental and physical health.

In the 1970s, Jay investigated new materials, invented applications, and became deeply involved with photography. She began to focus on weird subjects, such as her dental bridge and her swim goggles. Her work from this period is rarely seen.

In 1981 Jay accepted a position teaching painting at Mills College, where she became a tenured professor five years later.


Examples:

Mountain No. 2, 1955
De Young / Jan's photo

Untitled (Mountain Series—Everest), 1955
Oakland / Jan's photo

The Verónica, 1957
SFMOMA / Jan's photo

The Rose, 1958-1966
Whitney / Jan's photo

Crescent Bridge II, 1970-72
Internet

Water Goggles, 1977
Internet

Ruth Asawa, 1926-2013

Ruth Asawa was one of the great sculptors of the 20th century because of the innovative and engaging forms she created she created in wire. Her work is so unprecedented in sculpture that it took a long time for the art world to realize that she was in the advance guard of form-making, but nowadays the market for her work is steadily rising.

Ruth was also a great woman who kept a racially mixed marriage together, raised a large family, engaged in civic life, and promoted art education.

She is of special interest to residents of the Bay Area because she made her home in Noe Valley in San Francisco, and was a prominent figure there for five decades. She died only a few years ago.

Background: Ruth was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, one of seven children. Her father operated a truck farm until World War II when he was detained by the FBI. Her family then lived in a Relocation Center in Arkansas, where Ruth graduated from high school.

Training: Ruth attended Milwaukee State Teachers College, intending to become an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

She enrolled instead at North Carolina’s experimental art school, Black Mountain College, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers, and studied there from 1946-1949.

Albert Lanier

Private life: While Ruth was at Black Mountain, she met an architecture student named Albert Lanier; she was 23 and he was 22. The pair decided to marry, against the wishes of their parents. They made their home in San Francisco because it had a vibrant arts community, and they hoped the liberal city would be hospitable to an interracial couple.

In the 1950s, while they were getting their careers started,  Ruth and Albert had six children. Albert became a noted architect and designed many homes in Noe Valley and other neighborhoods in the city.  He also created the architectural designs for Ruth's public art projects and shared her community activism.

When Albert died in 2008, he and Ruth had been married 59 years.

Ruth with her children, 1958
Photo by Imogen Cunningham

Ruth and Albert

Career: Ruth started her career and her family in the 1950s. Her first great innovation was to employ wire in abstract sculpture. Wire was sometimes employed by Mexican basket-makers for produce baskets, and Ruth had been impressed by this. Wire was humble and cheap, and like the traditional basket-makers, she could work on baskets while her children played around her. Ruth elevated the humble basket by making it a closed globular form, and hanging the globes in vertical strings. They engage the eye because there are forms within forms; the viewer can't resist tracing the lines and shapes. And the shadows created by the baskets are magical. By the end of the 1950s, Ruth's baskets were beginning to attract attention.

In 1962, Ruth innovated with wire again. Instead of making closed, inward-looking forms, she tied the wire to create radiating forms that reach out like petals or leaves. Instead of hanging, these forms are placed flat against the wall, where they also make magical shadows.

In 1968, Ruth began creating a number of fountains for public commissions in San Francisco. Much to everyone's surprise, her first sculpture was representational, depicting two mermaids afloat, one of them nursing a baby. The Mermaid fountain is located in Ghirardelli Square on the water front.

In 1973, she created a fountain for the Hyatt Hotel on Union Square that became a San Francisco landmark. The fountain is basically a cylinder covered with low relief figures representing typical San Francisco scenes. Her method of construction was unique because it was a community activity. Ruth gave a group of children and other budding artists a type of dough that could be molded like clay and then "fired" in an ordinary oven. They used the dough to depict scenes. The finished work was translated into bronze. Albert provided the architectural design.

This sculpture entered the news in 2013 because Apple proposed a new store next to the hotel that eliminated the fountain. The public outcry was such that Apple redesigned its store, and renovated the fountain and the surrounding plaza.

Ruth was also interested in origami, the Japanese art of creating figures by folding paper, and from 1976-1986, she created fountains that are bronze renderings of origami structures.

In the 1990s, Ruth created relief murals for public places. The Federal Building in San Jose has a bas-relief bronze mural depicting the Japanese internment camps.

In addition to being an artist, Ruth was an advocate for art education. She taught art to elementary school kids herself, supported various programs in art education, and she and Albert founded a public arts high school. She also served in state and national organizations for art education, and she was a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In anticipation of the new de Young Museum, Ruth was invited to create a permanent installation for the base of the tower. She selected and gave 15 of her most significant hanging-basket sculptures, which have been prominently displayed since the building opened in 2005.

Our photos of Ruth's Sculptures

Untitled (S. 270),  c. 1954
brass and iron wire
Whitney / Jan's photo, 2015

Untitled (S.114, Hanging, Six-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form
with One Suspended and Two Tied Spheres), ca. 1958
SFMOMA / Jan's photo, 2016

Untitled (S.046abcd), c. 1960
SFMOMA / Jan's photo

Display at de Young Museum, undated and untitled
Photo by Dan L. Smith, 2008

Untitled, c. 1970
Crystal Bridges / Jan's photo, 2012

Façade of Oakland Museum of Art
Untitled (tied wire), 1974
Jan's photo

Façade of Oakland Museum of Art
Untitled (tied wire), 1974
Jan's photo / 2010

Internet grabs

Untitled (S.039), 1959
monel wire
ruthasawa.com

Untitled (S.049), c. 1962
naturally oxidized copper wire
ruthasawa.com

Eight-Branched Bronze Wire Form, 1966
artnet.com

Andrea, 1968
Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco
Cast bronze
ruthasawa.com

Hyatt on Union Square Fountain, 1973
San Francisco
ruthasawa.com

Origami Fountains, 1976
 #1 of 5, Buchanan Street in Japantown
Internet

Aurora, 1986 

Bayside Plaza, San Francisco

stainless steel / 13 ft diameter

Internet

Japanese American Internment Memorial Sculpture, 1994
Federal Building, San Jose, CA
Cast bronze
ruthasawa.com

Hung Liu, born 1948

Hung Liu is considered one of the most significant Chinese-American contemporary artists living today. A teacher at Mills College for the past 20 years, she lives and works in Oakland. Liu is her family name; her first name is Hung. Her work is frequently seen at local museums.

Background: Hung was born in Changchun, China in 1948, and grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Soon after her birth, her father, an officer in Chiang Kai Shiek's Nationalist army, was arrested, and her mother was forced to divorce him in order to protect herself and her newborn child. He was sent to jail, and was imprisoned on and off for the next fifty years. Hung found him in a prison labor camp in 1994.

Learn from the poor and lower-middle peasants and serve them, 1972
Internet

Training: Hung excelled as a student, but with the coming of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, she was sent to labor in a remote village for 4 years.

After the Cultural Revolution, Hung was admitted to Beijing Teachers College, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1975. Subsequently she received a graduate degree in Mural Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1981. She acknowledges the influence of socialist-realist mural-painting techniques she was taught.

When Hung was 36—in 1984—she was allowed to leave China to study at UC San Diego, where she had been was offered a scholarship in the graduate studio-art program. One of the first people from mainland China to study abroad and pursue an art career, she received her MFA in painting two years later. She has since received a number of grants and awards.

Hung Liu in front of a painting from
her "Daughters of China" series

Career: Hung's career started in 1975, after she graduated from Teachers College, when she began teaching art at an elite school in Beijing. She also began weekly art lessons for children on television. Her program “How to Draw and Paint,” was renowned, and lasted several years.

In this country, Hung has specialized in paintings based on historical Chinese photographs. Her subjects over the years have been prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners, among others. She combines these figures with classically rendered birds, flowers, and calligraphy. She washes her realistic images in veils of dripping linseed oil, creating a sort of "weeping realism" that suggests the erosion of memory and the passage of time, while also bringing faded photographic images vividly to life as rich paintings.

In 1991 Hung was able to visit China. She discovered a collection of turn of the century photos of Chinese prostitutes, which became the source for many paintings.

In later years she became especially interested in the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange. She has used many of Lange’s images of Dust Bowl refugee children and black and Latino workers in paintings.

Another recent body of work turns away from the human figure in favor of botanicals. These very detailed, 80-by-80-inch paintings concentrate their gaze on the humble dandelion, found throughout both China and the U.S. She says, "The dandelion is not a pretty flower. Everybody tries to kill them. It’s a survivor story.”

In 1986 Hung Liu had an exhibition in Washington, D.C. that included an installation piece: a pyramid of "Fortune Cookies." There were also works in new forms.

In 1990, Liu became a professor in the Art Department at Mills College. She retired from teaching in 2014, but as of 2019, she is still a productive artist.

Examples:

A Third World, 1994
Santa Barbara Museum of Art / Internet

Chinese Profile II, 1998
SJMA / Internet blog (private shot, against the rules)

Shoemakers, 1999
Crocker / Jan's photo

Sister, 2000
NMWA / Internet

Silver River, 2013 (small section)
Site-specific mural
San Jose / Internet

Jade Lady, 2006
Oil on board
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA
Photo by Dan L. Smith, 2006

Mountain Ghost, 2012
Internet

The Botanist, 2013
SFMOMA / Jan's photo

Ladies, 2014
Internet grab

Allentown, 2015
Internet

Title not given on Hung Liu's website, 2016

Private life:

At the age of 29, after  securing a position as an art teacher at an elite elementary school in Beijing, Hung married an architect. They separated within a year; her son, Ling Chen, was born the following year. It appears that Ling Chen was cared for by Hung's mother and aunt, until her career in the United States was established.

Hung came to the U.S. in 1984 to study at UCSD. Here she met fellow student Jeff Kelley, a specialist in art history, and the two were married in 1986. Her son Ling Chen joined them that year, at the age of eight. Both Hung Liu and her son became citizens in 1991.

Kelley is a prominent art critic and historian, who has recently retired as Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The couple lives in Oakland. Kelley manages Liu's studio.

Jeff Kelley, art critic and curator

Jeff and Hung, outside SJMA, 2014
Internet blog