Helen S. Smith Gallery Presents
Becky Frehse: Tone Poems
Becky Frehse was born and raised in Illinois and spent her summers roaming freely on her father’s Boy Scout camp in the north woods of Wisconsin. The Art Institute of Chicago was where Becky fell in love with fine art as a child, and later, she spent two summers in Europe immersed in art before studying painting and drawing at Arizona State University. She earned a B.F.A. from ASU in 1980 and went to New York where she worked as a picture framer and as an artist in her tiny, Lower East Side studio. In 1981, Becky moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to work as an artist’s studio assistant. She also learned to repair and restore wall murals in the colonial mansions of New England. Becky earned her M.F.A. in painting at Central Washington University and began her teaching career there while also working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. After graduation, she traveled all over central and eastern Washington teaching and sharing her work as an Artist in Residence with the Washington State Arts Commission.
After returning from her time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1986, Becky taught for many years as an artist in residence at Pacific Lutheran University where she also directed their University Gallery and the first Women’s Center on campus. Becky’s long involvement with arts education also included teaching at independent schools and contracting with school districts to provide professional development for classroom teachers in art education. She recently retired from teaching in the art department at the University of Puget Sound and now teaches privately at her busy studio in Tacoma.
International travels and especially longer sojourns in China have significantly influenced Becky’s approach to painting and drawing. Her semi-abstract, mixed media work evolved from studying traditional Chinese painting techniques with Chinese landscape painters in Guangdong Province while living in Guangzhou. In 1995 she received an Artist Trust GAP grant to travel with the National Women’s Caucus for Art to present at the UN-NGO Conference on Women in Huairou, China. Her mixed media work from this period is in public and private collections.
Currently, Becky’s studio practice involves many directions; exploration of musical themes by repurposing musical instruments for public art installations, making mixed media paintings that explore the memory of places, and collaborations with other artists. Since 2010, she has been working with the ceramic artist Jane Kelsey-Mapel to create two and three-dimensional montages in an ongoing series of figurative sculptures collectively called ReConfigured. Twelve of their “reconfigured” pieces were featured at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in 2013 and they show their work regularly at Practical Art in Phoenix.
Becky is married to Greg Youtz, a composer and professor of music at Pacific Lutheran University. They have two daughters and now spend most of their travel time visiting their grandson and his parents in London.