Sondra Freckelton

Sondra Freckelton was born in Dearborn, Michigan in 1936 and passed away in Oneonta, New York in 2019. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began her career as a sculptor working in wood and plastics, exhibiting under her married name, Sondra Beal. She debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in the Recent Sculpture U.S.A. show in 1959 and achieved her first one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960.

During the mid-1970's Ms. Freckelton was one of several noted abstract artists who turned to realism in their work. She began working in transparent watercolor – a logical extension of the delicate watercolor studies she did for her transparent vacuum-formed sculptures. She had her first solo show of large-scale color saturated watercolors with the Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1976. Numerous museums, galleries and traveling shows throughout the United States have exhibited her watercolors. She had solo exhibits at major galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington, D. C., and San Francisco. Some of the public collections that include her work are the Art Institute of Chicago; Dennos Museum, MI; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; Madison Art Center, WI; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA; Oklahoma City Museum; and Oglethorpe Museum, GA.

Ms. Freckelton's work and teaching philosophy are the subjects of the Watson-Guptill publication entitled Dynamic Still Lifes in Watercolor by M. Stephen Doherty. Other publications that include her work are Contemporary American Realist Drawings, Hudson Hills Press, 1999; American Watercolor, by Chris Finch, Abbeville Press, 1986; and The Art of Watercolor, by Charles LeClair, Watson-Guptill, NY, 1994.

Sondra Freckelton worked near Oneonta, New York at the home and studio she and her late husband, Jack Beal, built.