Tonight's queer artist feature is Dwora Fried
Dwora Fried is an assemblage artist creating mixed media sculptural spaces in small, large and life-size wooden boxes. She populates them with objects, miniature vintage furniture, dolls, toys and fabrics from the 50s, adding photographs, plastic, wood, metal and paint.
Her small rooms evoke what it was like to grow up as an outsider in postwar Vienna: being Jewish, lesbian and a child of Holocaust survivors, she learned to see everything through the prism of loss, danger and secrecy. “I inherited a sense of isolation, displacement and an appreciation for the surreal.”
Fried has had solo shows in London, England, Venice, Italy at the Jewish Museum and Vienna, Austria where her art is in the permanent collection of Austria’s MUSA Museum. Her Los Angeles solo shows have been at Sparc Art, LAAA/Gallery 825 and One Archives Gallery
Her work has been part of group shows at Chicago’s Elmhurst Art Museum, San Francisco’s Arc Gallery, Orange County Center for the Arts and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.
Group shows in Los Angeles include BG Gallery , Launch LA/Korean Cultural Center, Irvine Fine Arts and the newly opened MASH gallery in Downtown LA (curated by Mat Gleason).
Fried’s life size interactive installations were part of her solo show at the Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825 and a political group show at Fullerton College Art.
Her most recent shows were at Castelli Art Space (curated by Peter Frank) and at Quotidian (curated by Jillith Moniz).
Fried’s book “Boxart,” with an introduction by Mat Gleason, was published in 2021.
Dwora Fried
The Art of Being Queer