The Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor Endowment and lecture series was created to honor the life and work of groundbreaking sculptor Viola Frey (1933–2004), who helped to revolutionize the field of ceramics with her monumental, boldly colored glazed clay sculptures. Art critic Ken Johnson in the New York Times wrote that she “expanded the traditional limitations of sculpture.”

In the same sense, Sahar Khoury, a Bay Area artist working through ceramics and sculpture continues upon Frey’s legacy of pushing the boundaries across mediums. Khoury makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Found or rejected objects that are immediate, abundant, and recurring serve as a script for constructions made of metal, clay, cement, and papier-mâché. Trained as an anthropologist and having never taken any fundamental art classes, Khoury continues to develop an idiosyncratic approach to merging diverse materials, with a primary commitment to spontaneity and interdependence.

Sahar Khoury is an artist based in Oakland, California. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013. She was the recipient of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2019 biannual SECA Art Award and the 2018 Triennial Exhibition, Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center, SFMOMA, YBCA, Oakland Museum of California, The Wattis Institute, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Scripps 77th Ceramic Annual, The Luggage Store (SF), Rebecca Camacho (SF) and CANADA (NY). Khoury’s work has been written about in the New Yorker, Art Review, and Hyperallergic.