Viola Frey is known for her brilliantly colored glazed ceramic pieces incorporating characters and symbols drawn from middle-class American knickknacks and kitsch, as well as other cultural traditions, to create a personal mythology of contemporary life and culture. Among her sculpture series are plates, figurine-based forms often in the shape of vessels or still-lifes on tables, and large figures with over-sized feet and hands. While she works in the medium of ceramics, painting is also an intimate part of her work, appearing in the form of decoration and embellishment of the glazed surfaces. She has also created drawings and pastels densely covered with figures drawn in expressionist color.

Born on a grape ranch in the agricultural community of Lodi, California, Frey became interested in art in high school, taking inspiration from the work of Henri Matisse, as well as from the "finds" of her father and grandfather, who were avid junk collectors. In 1956 she received her B.F.A. in painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she studied painting under Richard Diebenkorn but also pursued interests in ceramics, establishing a lifelong pattern of working simultaneously in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art forms. In 1958 she received her M.F.A. from Tulane University, studying with Mark Rothko as well as abstract expressionist ceramist Catherine Choy. During a two-year stint in New York, she came to appreciate the work of Philip Guston, Jasper Johns and Jean Dubuffet. In 1960 she returned to California, living since 1975 in Oakland, where she teaches at the California College of Arts and Crafts. She has been a summer artist-in-residence in Sčvres, France, noted for its eighteenth-century ceramics tradition.

Several themes emerge in Frey’s work, most obviously issues of relationships with "things" and collecting. Her studies in ceramics, often taught from an archeological perspective, gave her an appreciation for cross-cultural meanings. Her work contains references to Asian and South American ceramic traditions, classical sculpture, and European decorative arts, as well as to contemporary American middle class culture. She began her career in an era when few recognized artists were women, and issues of gender and power, and what it means to be an artist and a woman, are also seen in her work.

Characteristic of Frey’s work is the placing of many ordinary objects together in seemingly random (but, in actuality, carefully considered) juxtapositions. She notes that her fondness for grouping and piling up diverse objects grew in part from experiences such as seeing the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in the middle 1960s, when "the whole vast array [of objects] was there together in the old museum before it all became separated out as art to display on a pedestal....everything was there, from Roman bathtubs to Greek stoves to stuffed animals, in such huge quantity that you really got a feeling of the life and the humanity of it all."¹ Flea markets have also provided inspiration for her work; seeing the Alameda (California) flea market with its crowded tables of figurines and bric-a-brac in strong outdoor light led Frey to begin experimenting with the use of strong hues—reds, yellows, blues—in her glazes to depict the play of light on surfaces.²

In World Civilizations #5, characters from storybooks and movies and kitsch figurines popular from the 1930s to 1950s are assembled in a towering pile on a small square pedestal table covered with a tablecloth. The entire sculpture is made of clay constructed in two parts (the table and the figures atop the table) and glazed in the shiny, bright colors of Italian majolica (pronounced muh-YOL-i-ca) pottery.³

Frey asserts that subject matter is central to her work. At the base of the pile of figures in this sculpture is a vessel in the shape of a pitcher with (pun intended) a baseball batter and catcher perched on top. At the right is Raggedy Ann, the rag doll from Johnny Gruelle’s storybooks of the 1930s. She is bent at the waist as if she is indeed a cloth doll bowed with the weight of the characters above her. In the center is Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Disney’s cartoon character based on a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl from the 1940s. Dumbo’s embarrassingly large ears become an asset when he realizes he can fly. On top of Dumbo is Curious George the Monkey (from the 1940s and 1950s storybooks by H. A. and Margret Rey), whose curiosity gets him into trouble. To the right of George is cowgirl Annie Oakley, whose story, based on the real life of a woman sharpshooter who took part in Wild Bill Hitchcock’s Wild West Shows, was popularized in the 1940s and 1950s in the musical, movie and television series "Annie Get Your Gun." Behind Annie are a large rabbit (perhaps modeled after a rubber squeeze toy) and a serving platter in the shape of a flower. In the place of honor at the top is the American eagle, symbol of the United States, crowded out by small figurines of a snowman, a bunny, a lamb and girl (perhaps Mary and her little lamb from the nursery rhyme), and St. Francis, befriender of animals.

Frey notes that she selects objects because they elicit a strong feeling. She is also interested in the cross-cultural significance of objects—who made them and for what purpose. While the figures are ordinary, and their placement on the table seems casual, there is nevertheless something out of the ordinary in the "muchness" of the display and the odd, incongruous use of the beautiful, rich colors in the majolica tradition of expensive Italian ceramics, to depict these kitsch items. There is a sense of parody in the use of materials—shiny, stiff ceramic to depict floppy cloth and rubber dolls—and in the scale. The careening pile-up suggests massiveness, but the content is by no means heroic. The objects threaten to topple over, as if they have been junked or tossed on the pile without a second thought, yet they are also carefully placed as if for display with each character facing front. The odd assortment of objects, representing kitchen, toy box, and adult’s knickknack shelf, implies a narrative—what are they doing here? who might have put them there and for what reason?

The title of the sculpture, World Civilizations #5, might suggest an elevated, respectable model of culture; however, the banality and mass-produced nature of these objects suggests the irony of a civilization that dominates a world cultural landscape but lacks a corresponding value or lasting contribution. "In a culture that imbues its objects—from automobiles to boats—with gender and emotional attributes, only to discard them two years later for a new model, Frey’s work resonates insistently with more durable meaning."⁴ While these characters were well-known in their time, they are less familiar (or even unknown) to the present younger generation, a statement in itself about the ephemerality of the culture represented in this sculpture.