Hopper Visiting Artist - Sara Morris

Thursday, Mar. 14, 2024, 5:30–6:30 p.m.

Kinship Structures:
Viola Frey, Charles Fiske, and Figurative Ceramics in California

Join us to hear Sara Morris, Ruth Rippon associate curator of ceramics for the Crocker Art museum, discuss the papers of artist Viola Frey and those of ceramics instructor Charles Kister Fiske, her mentor and life partner. Morris will also discuss a series of posthumous oral history interviews with members of Frey and Fiske's circle for the Archives of American Art's Viola Frey Oral History Project in 2014–15. Together, these materials reveal a queer reciprocity of care and kinship that was vital to their work, and more broadly, the history of postwar ceramics in California. In analyzing three ceramic sculptures through the lens of queer kinship, Morris conceives of Frey's figurative artworks as critical interventions that contributed to a queer visibility during the gay liberation movement in the United States. Frey's group sculpture Family Portrait (1995) particularly troubles assumptions about the heteronormativity of her figurative group sculptures, proposing instead a queer network of relationships that Morris describes as "kinship structures."

Sara Morris recently joined the Crocker Art Museum after working in museums and regional community galleries focused on modern and contemporary art, craft, and design across the country, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. She is a PhD candidate with a doctoral emphasis in feminist studies in the History of Art & Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, "Clay Bodies: Figurative Ceramics and the Crafting of Identity in Postwar Sculpture," traces a history of figurative ceramic sculpture by women artists on the West Coast. Her project is supported by a Library Research Grant at the Getty Research Institute; a Predoctoral Smithsonian Fellowship; and a Helen Zucker Seeman Curatorial, Research, and Writing Fellowship for Women through the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. Morris holds an MA in art history and visual culture from San Jose State University, where she also received her BA in art history with a minor in studio art.

mlott@csuchico.edu