Clay & Wood: Viola Frey, Paul Discoe, and collaborative art spaces in West Oakland

Experience Viola Frey’s work beneath a canopy of trees trellised by Paul Discoe at O2 Artisans Aggregate, in West Oakland. Twenty-five years ago, Frey built her final monumental works as Discoe founded his joinery workshop, both pushing the capacity of their mediums: clay and wood. The exhibition brings two distinct practices rooted in craft into conversation, and explores their legacy as mentors to the next generation.

For Clay & Wood, collaborative artist duo CrossLypka (Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka), whose studio is at O2 Artisans Aggregate (O2AA), curate a selection of rarely seen, unglazed Frey sculptures from the mid-1970s that feature mysterious, abstracted, and psycho-mythic subjects. Bringing them out of storage for the first time in decades, CrossLypka situates the sculptures among ferns and grasses, as they lived in Frey’s backyard, emphasizing her interest in bricolage and her exploration of how clay can “cooperate with nature…to see how light affects it.”

Frey, a ceramicist and teacher, and Discoe, a Buddhist priest and woodworker, first read as opposites: maximalist and minimalist. Together, they trace the possibilities of artists and craftspeople working in a postindustrial landscape.

Throughout the three-month run, O2AA and Artists’ Legacy Foundation invite visitors into Frey and Discoe’s history through participatory programming by contemporary artists. Futurefarmers, whose work shares ecological principles with Discoe’s, will bring their ongoing exploration of papermaking, boatbuilding, and the Bay’s estuarine ecology to O2AA for the final month of the exhibition. This multisited work will transform a barn into a provisional workshop to create a collectively built vessel. Other events will include ceramic casting, music performance, and community gatherings.

Clay & Wood: Viola Frey, Paul Discoe, and collaborative art spaces in West Oakland is curated by CrossLypka.