bio

Fay Freedman (1922-1998) was raised in a large, Jewish, immigrant family in the industrial Midwest, first in Gary, Indiana, and then Detroit, Michigan. She studied at Wayne State University, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and the Detroit Institute of Fine Art. After she married Arthur Freedman, an economics professor, in 1946, the couple moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where Fay taught illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and studied sculpture with Waldemar Raemisch.

In 1948 they moved to Lewiston, Maine, where she continued working in sculpture and explored other media, before they settled in the Philadelphia area in 1955. While raising two children, she pursued her interests in printmaking, including woodcuts, linoleum prints and etchings. Always both a student and a teacher, she continued her studies at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art and the Barnes Foundation, as well as assuming instructor positions at colleges and art centers in the Philadelphia area.  Her works were represented in many galleries in Philadelphia and other cities and in collections across the United States and abroad. (See her resume for a selected list of galleries, collections, awards, and instructorships.)

Shortly after her death in 1998, the Wallingford Art Center, where she taught for several decades, created a gallery dedicated to her memory. The Fay Freedman Memorial Gallery continues to showcase fine arts exhibits.

statement about her work

I am one of Fay Freedman’s daughters and am writing this to try to capture some part of what my mother’s art meant to her. While I am not an artist or student of art, I have drawn from memories of what she said about art and life over many years.  

She loved the whole wide world of the arts. It was like a wondrous smorgasbord to her. Maybe some artists could “stay in one lane” – to use a contemporary expression – or create “a brand” by working in one medium on one subject.  She couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She began working in sculpture and ceramics, took up printmaking, and ultimately worked in collage, pastels, craypas, gouache, and watercolors.  She was always studying the work of artists she admired through books (of which she had hundreds), trips to galleries and museums, and workshops. 

Her subjects were mainly people or abstract/nonobjective studies. She did some still life works, but those were rare.

For many years, she taught a workshop in figure drawing at the Wallingford Art Center, outside Philadelphia, and generally found the models herself. Mainly she discovered them in everyday settings. She’d be at the grocery store and see someone with an interesting face or holding themselves in an arresting way and ask if they’d model for her workshop. She was enthusiastically democratic about who she asked to model, as the figure drawings and paintings shown here reflect.

She had no interest in capturing a hyper-realistic portrait of the model. Rather, she sought to provide an opening into the character of each person she drew. But more than that, her drawings and paintings explore the dignity inherent in each person. She thought that life was hard and often egregiously unfair. There is nothing casual about the faces of the people she portrayed. Almost to a person, they look resolute, dignified, resilient. 

For her, making art was a passionate and all-absorbing commitment. She frequently expressed her regret that she was not helping people in some more direct and immediate way. In her figurative studies, she expressed her admiration and drew the faces of people determined to survive.

Her abstract studies and collages are a different story. She was critical of quasi-philosophical explanations of such works. Not for her were the obscure and opaque descriptions of abstract art. She called herself a colorist and viewed her abstract works (or nonobjective pieces as she would have called them) as puzzles to be worked out by playing with color, shape, texture, and line. The goal was to achieve some fresh harmony or to surprise the observer with a novel image of what color and line made possible. 

Her last weeks were spent in an intensive care unit after failed open heart surgery. Once during those devastating weeks, I asked what she was thinking. I expected something about life, death, her fears. She answered, I am painting in my mind’s eye.

Michal Freedman
August 30, 2021