Viola Frey (1933–2004) was a prolific creator who produced thousands of artworks during her lifetime. While best known for her ceramic monumental sculptures, Frey’s artmaking spanned more than 40 years and encompassed paintings, drawings, and bronze and glass sculptures. Frey was obsessively devoted to her practice and produced thousands of artworks during her lifetime. Her work explores social constructs, marks of civilization, and gender dynamics, and features a thoughtfully built iconography including suited men, hands, and cast figurines. Her work in clay was ahead of its time, bridging the gap between craft and fine art, while pushing the boundaries of ceramic sculpture. Viola Frey received her BFA and honorary doctorate from California College of the Arts and Crafts in 1953 and attended graduate school at Tulane University. She taught at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) for over three decades, influencing generations of young artists and formalizing the use of clay as an artistic medium.

Ruby Neri draws upon twentieth-century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between; this places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. Over the last twenty years, Neri has also been one of the leading figures in the return to ceramics as a contemporary artmaking medium. The vessels that have dominated her production during this period evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Her use of sprayed glazes, meanwhile, links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making.

Cynthia de Bos is director of collections and archives at Artists’ Legacy Foundation, which stewards the Viola Frey estate and manages the Viola Frey Archives. Since joining the Foundation in 2013, de Bos has organized the papers, photographic materials, and digital assets in the Viola Frey Archives, as well as overseen exhibitions, publications, and public programming. Prior to that, she held positions at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, the Jay DeFeo Foundation, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She has also consulted on projects for museums, art galleries, artists, and private collectors around the Bay Area. De Bos was co-editor of Frey’s first monograph Viola Frey: Artist’s Mind/Studio World and compiled the comprehensive chronology included in the book. 

Jenelle Porter is a curator, writer, and editor. She is the curator, with Jeffrey Gibson, of An Indigenous Present, ICA Boston (October 2025). Recent exhibitions include Barbara T. Smith: Proof, ICA LA (2023), Kay Sekimachi: Geometries, Berkeley Art Museum (2021), and Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019). She co-edited An Indigenous Present with Jeffrey Gibson (2023), and a Viola Frey monograph (2024). She has held curatorial positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Artists Space, New York; Walker Art Center; and Whitney Museum of American Art.