Join MAD and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation for an evening conversation in celebration of the publication of Viola Frey: Artist’s Mind/Studio/World, the first monograph published about the legendary California artist. Moderator Cynthia de Bos will be joined by MAD Artist Studios alumna Heidi Lau, author Dan Nadel, and curator Jodi Throckmorton to discuss Viola Frey’s artistic practice. 

Viola Frey’s prolific career spanned over fifty years and straddled mediums, seamlessly transitioning between three dimensions and two, from the intimate to the monumental. Known best for her large-scale figurative ceramic sculptures—many towering over 10 feet tall—Frey’s dedication to her art practice extended beyond her devotion to clay and encompassed painting, drawing, and varied mediums for sculpture. MAD’s 2010 survey Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey was the artist’s first major exhibition since her death in 2004. Frey’s work is part of MAD’s permanent collection and was recently on view as part of Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture. 

Books will be available for purchase.

About the artist

Viola Frey (1933–2004) was born in Lodi, California, and lived and worked in Oakland. She received a B.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, studied graduate coursework at Tulane University, New Orleans, lived and worked in Port Chester, NY before returning to Oakland in 1960. She devoted the next four decades to her art making and growing the ceramics program at CCAC. In 2000, Frey received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from CCAC where she taught for more than 30 years. She twice received an Artist’s Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other awards and accolades. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections across the country and abroad, including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

About the Panelists

Heidi Lau grew up in Macau and lives and works in New York. Lau’s sculpture practice views clay as the ideal conduit to explore the malleability and materiality of time. Lau’s work has been the subject of solo and two person exhibitions at Matthew Brown, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Bureau, Green-Wood Cemetery, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Macau Museum of Art, among others. In 2019, Lau presented Apparition for the Macau-China Collateral Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale. She has participated in several group exhibitions both internationally and in the US and is the recipient of a number of awards and residencies. Lau is one of six artists shortlisted for the M+ Museum’s Sigg Prize 2025 and will be featured in an exhibition with other finalists in September. Her work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Macau Museum of Art, and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.

Dan Nadel is the author of Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life (2025). His previous books include It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago (2021), Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence (2020), and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries (2006). Nadel has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the founder of PictureBox, a publishing and packaging company that produced more than one hundred books, objects, and zines, including the Grammy Award–winning design for Wilco’s 2004 album A Ghost Is Born. Nadel is the curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

Jodi Throckmorton is chief curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC). Before joining JMKAC in 2022, she was curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where she organized Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game (2021–22) and Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (2018–19, co-curated), among many other exhibitions. Previously, while at the San José Museum of Art, Throckmorton curated Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (2015).

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. De Bos is the co-editor and a contributor of Viola Frey: Artist’s Mind/Studio/ World (2024).