It strikes one, therefore, as very logical that the current exhibit of her work at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art is called Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. Created in conjunction with the Racine Art Museum of Racine, WI, it will travel to the Museum of Art and Design in New York City and the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, AR, once the show closes in Toronto on January 10, 2010. There are a total of 22 objects in this exhibit consisting of plates, statues, figures, groupings, and paintings, all of them of monumental size and shape.

This unusual woman may have had a shy nature when faced with her audience, but there is nothing shy in the manner Frey expressed herself in her art. Born on a farm in Lodi, CA, away from any exposure to art, she nevertheless propelled herself into college and then with the help of a scholarship to the California College of Arts & Crafts. After obtaining a bachelor's degree there she went on to Tulane University to obtain her MFA.

It appears that being dominated by three brothers had a profound influence on her. It may have been a reason for her tenacity to succeed. This may account for her being the only one of the four Frey children to obtain a university education. In addition, her brothers' looming presence may in part be the reason for her omitting mouths from some of her male figures while her females are far more expressive. One says "may" because Frey, not only shy in the presence of strangers, also left little written down. It seems that her medium of expression was solely in the images of clay, and in paint of one kind or another.

The Gardiner exhibit, though limited in number of artworks, raises the question why Frey seemed to see men invariably as threatening while her grandmotherly women—for the most part—appear so benign. Yet, it was male colleagues who fosterd her career, and her life companion, Charles Fiske (1914-99), put her career ahead of his. "We've got to have that big huge open WELCOME workshop- home-house OPEN HOUSE IN OAKLAND BERKLEY RICHMOND so that Frey can work with people, work with people work with people working work with people working whom she loves and who will, GOD willing love her. This is the only way for her to keep working and to work so that her achievements enchant and delight and finally beguile and seduce others into their beauty and their lessons whatever & form and skill . . . " from Fiske's notebook entries January 10 - March 7, 1974.

Viewing her bricolage works and her canvases, one gets the feeling that Frey's overpowering impulse appears to have been to create order out of chaos, while at the same time offering up images that take a critical stab at 20^th century mores. A collector of bric-a-brac and what can be loosely described as junk of every kind, she incorporated these into her work in a seemingly chaotic manner, yet on closer look, one senses the total control she exercised over her work.

Born in 1933, she died in Burbank aged not quite71. She battled a series of debilitating illnesses from 1991 onward, none of which stopped her from working. She had settled in Burbank in 1975 after first working in San Francisco and before that on the East Coast. During these last years, ever eager to explore new artistic avenues, she contracted with Oakland glassblower Chuck Vannatta to investigate glass by using reverse painting. Though this exhibit does not include any of these objects, it is just another point to show just how seminal an artist she was.

There has only been one other time when ceramic figures have had an overpowering and almost intimidating effect on me, while also filling me with a feeling of awe. This was almost two decades ago in Xi'an when I entered the Ford Foundation-sponsored giant hall built across the excavation site of the human-sized army of terra cotta warriors created for China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang a little over 2,000 years ago. Although Frey's figures, vases and benches are only minuscule in number compared to the number of figures in Xi'an, they nevertheless elicit their grandeur. Like the clay artists of the Chinese emperor's time had to find ways and means to create large objects and fire these in their kilns, so Frey had to develop processes to cast her works and fire them. Of course, we are still fortunate to see the colors on her works, while in Xi'an only specks of color have remained here and there, eroded after millennia buried underground.

There is also another major difference between the Chinese terra cotta figures and bronze objects and Frey's clay works and canvases. The first where meant never to be seen by human eyes once enclosed in the emperor's mausoleum, while the latter' s works were very much meant to be viewed by as wide a public as possible. Unfortunately, once this exhibit closes in Little Rock on Dec. 5, 2010, it is highly unlikely that another major exhibit of Frey's works will ever again be assembled. It takes special knowledge to assemble the many pieces in which her clay works come together, and only one man still knows how to do this, her former assistant, Sam Perry. The statues and groupings weigh hundreds of pounds and were cast in sections that are held together with invisible bolts and screws. Frey made little attempt to hide where the seams are located although she carefully worked them into the design.