Foundational Friendship: Katherine Choy and Viola Frey
The original Clay Art Center sign, which now hangs in the Choy Studio.
Katherine Choy and Henry Okamoto founded Clay Art Center in 1957 as an artist cooperative to promote the art of ceramics and foster a supportive environment for emerging artists. As a rising star in the field, Katherine was able to use her connections to secure funding for Clay Art Center, and Henry dedicated himself to keeping the organization open in the decades after Katherine’s early passing. While their working partnership served as the foundation for Clay Art Center, the early days of the cooperative included a small cohort of artists determined to advance clay as an artform. Some artists would stay for years, while others only worked at Clay Art Center for a short while before going out into the wider world to make their mark. One of those earliest members of the cooperative, who would go on to become one of the most influential ceramicists of the 20th century, was Viola Frey. A student of Katherine’s at Tulane, Viola decided to leave her graduate studies early in order to join her friend in building Clay Art Center.
At Tulane it was just so hot . . . Oh, it was. . . . Coming from California or the Bay area, that muggy hot weather from New Orleans was really oppressive, and so Kath and I we drove from New Orleans to New York.
-Viola Frey Oral History, Archives of American Art
Katherine had studied ceramics at Mills College with F. Carlton Ball and Antonio Preito, followed by graduate studies at Cranbrook Academy, where she studied with Maija Grotell. Interested in glaze research and experimentation, one of Katherine’s projects at this time involved working with rare pigments sent to her from her family in Hong Kong. It was during Katherine’s time as an assistant professor at Tulane University that she met Viola, who was only five years her junior. Viola was born in Lodi, California (Henry Okamoto’s hometown), the daughter of grape ranchers. From an early age, she knew she wanted to pursue art, but when Viola initially enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1953, she intended to major in painting because it was taken more seriously as a fine art at the time. Ultimately, she gravitated toward the ceramics department because of its community feeling, though her painting skills never left her, and she shifted between two-dimensional and three-dimensional artwork with ease, often in the same piece. Viola began making her colossal statues of brightly painted men and women in the 1970s, and these would become her most iconic works.
Viola’s experience of the fine art/craft divide was not unusual, but by the late 1950s, that divide was crumbling. Destroying this divide, and securing respect for ceramics as a fine art, was something that Katherine, Viola, and many of the early members of the Clay Art Center were passionately invested in. It was in this context that the first mission statement of Clay Art Center was written, with the express intention of creating a place “to promote the art of clay–ceramics and sculpture–as culture on an advanced level...” In a world that “stomped on clay” (to use Viola’s phrase), the early members of Clay Art Center were determined to show that pottery was art in its own right, and they were willing to forgo the comforts of academic positions, housing, and even heat at times in order to achieve their goals.
I lived at the Clay Art Center… We slept in the different offices. It was, you know, living right there with your work. And Katherine Choy and all of us, we had this lofty idea that we would promote clay as an art form… We were serious.
-Viola Frey Oral History, Archives of American Art
Even amongst the serious work, there was also plenty of room for fun. Living and working together, Viola remembered the group as tightly knit. She recalled doing portraits of one another in down moments and challenging each other to little competitions, as well as the snafus of group living: apparently, one cold winter day, a window was left open and she woke up to snow drifts in the bathroom. While Viola was at Clay Art Center, she also commuted to New York City to work in the billing department at the Museum of Modern Art in order to make money to support her art and the cooperative.
Viola was reportedly heartbroken when Katherine died so tragically young in 1958. She left New York for California soon after Katherine’s passing, where she would begin creating her signature larger-than-life, brightly colored figural sculptures, some of them reaching up to 12 feet tall. These massive men and women in their suits and 50s housewife-style dresses would come to be seen as insightful commentaries on gender norms and American culture. While she never built one of her towering sculptures in Port Chester, Viola was clear that her time at Clay Art Center was essential to her development, “I knew that I wanted to make a mark. And I knew that when I was in New York City… and lived out at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester… in New York I had to survive in order to be an artist. And when I came back out to California I realized that I had to be an artist in order to survive. So New York was very important for me. I mean, it did, you know, complete its magic in terms of having come to that decision.” While we can’t know what Katherine would have gone on to create had she lived longer, we can appreciate the inspiration and mentorship she offered others like Viola, and the incredible things they would go on to do.
You can listen to Viola Frey’s full Oral History at the Archives of American Art. You can learn more about Viola Frey on the Viola Frey Artists’ Legacy Foundation website.