Meet the Women of Frogtown, An Artist Community Like No Other

“We definitely influence each other,” says Neri, who has started painting again, inspired by the seeming ease of her studio neighbors’ processes. “I’m always laboring over clay,” she says, laughing. Two or three of the artists often have lunch together at a big picnic table in the fenced-in parking lot out front, where Neri’s sculptures hold court and clumps of tall native grasses grow wild in the cracks. On occasion, they’ll drink tequilas there, too, at the end of the day. “There’s so much ego in creativity,” Reed says, “but I don’t feel any of that here.” On the weekends, the studios are full of the artists’ children and pets—five dogs and one cat. Michelle Obama paid a visit last fall. “She was in such high spirits,” Stockman remembers. 
“So warm and knowledgeable and full of questions.”

Frogtown, which got its name decades ago when there was an invasion of small toads, has become one of the hot spots for artists. A number of artists—including Urs Fischer and Thomas Houseago—have studios there, and real estate prices are rising fast. But the five artists, who have weathered a lot of ups and downs during the pandemic, aren’t worried. “The warmth of the studio has been the one constant,” Stockman says. “It’s really been the buoy in the storm these past two years.”

“I ’m definitely a California girl,” Neri says. She grew up in the Bay Area, the daughter of Manuel Neri, a Mexican American artist whose figurative sculptures were part of the funk art movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Manuel, who taught for years at the University of California, Davis, was such a big presence that Ruby “didn’t want to deal with sculpture at all.” She started out as a graffiti artist in what became the Mission School group, spray-​painting horses on walls around town and using the tag reminisce. She didn’t work with clay until she was 35, “and then it just snowballed,” she says. “Clay was an immediate fit for me. It’s so warm and tactile.” At least one of Neri’s bronze castings will be in her show this fall at David Kordansky Gallery in L.A. She is married to a Swedish woodworker and sculptor named Torbjörn Vejvi, whom she met at grad school, and with whom she has a daughter, Sigrid, 13. “As an artist, you spend so much time alone. Work is great, but you go long periods without talking.” The community has been an antidote to that. “We’re all really secure with our own selves. There’s a lot of confidence, and I appreciate that.”

“It feels very much like Seinfeld here,” Hilary Pecis, 42, says, “a real open-door kind of situation…. Everyone here has a good work ethic, but we all love a little break for a conversation.” When visitors come to Pecis’s studio, she takes them to every other studio as well, and she has a lot of visitors these days: One of her canvases went for $870,000 at Christie’s last year, and all of the new work at her current show at Rachel Uffner in New York was sold before the opening. “Hilary is very much the mother of the studio,” Reed says. “In the past few years, she’s really been on the big stage in the art world, and she’s constantly trying to bring people with her.” Most of Pecis’s paintings come from her own photographs of friends’ interiors, but she recently worked from photos that Stockman and Reed took. “This is a pandemic thing, because I’m not visiting as many friends or doing the things I did before.” The cat in Clementine’s Bookshelf is a portrait of Reed’s gray tabby, made from the photo.