Audrea Kreye

Lillian Audrea Coddington Kreye (February 16, 1919 – April 3, 2010), known professionally as “Audrea Kreye,” was an American educator and artist, metalsmith and jewelry designer, who was particularly known for her anticlastic and enameled jewelry as well as her liturgical and religious metalworks in silver.

Early life
Kreye was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, the daughter of Lillian Fedderman and William Coddington.

Kreye graduated from Plainfield High School in 1935 and received her B.A. from Keuka College in Keuka, New York, and her M.A. from Columbia University's Teacher's College in New York City. She spent the first part of her career as a teacher of French, history and civics in New Jersey at Bound Brook High School, located in Bound Brook, New Jersey, from 1943 through 1960. She departed her position due to her marriage to Warren C. Kreye and their impending move to Dayton, Ohio.

Though she began her career as a public school teacher, she had been interested for many years in jewelry design and manufacture, with some sources dating that interest to the early 1930s when she was a teenager. She began designing and making her own jewelry and had her first known public exhibition was in 1955 at the Barbizon Plaza Art Gallery in New York City with members of the Craft Students League of the Plainfield Y.W.C.A.

Career
Kreye was a student of the Finnish-American metalsmith, Heikki Seppä. She became known for her work as a maker of anticlastic jewelry, where individual pieces were formed out of single sheets of metal, which in the case of Kreye, was primarily done utilizing copper or silver. She also utilized the talents of her husband, a chemist, who in the late 1960s/early 1970s helped her devise methods of using electroplating in her work. During this period, she experimented with mixing glass and stained glass into her pieces, as was noted in the book The Complete Book of Creative Glass Art by Polly Rothenberg (1974).

By the early 1970s Kreye was teaching jewelry making at the YWCA in Kettering, Ohio. In the mid-1970s she also began teaching copper enameling at the Dayton Senior Citizens’ Center. From roughly 1982 until the early 2000s Kreye was a regular instructor at the Riverbend Art Center in Dayton, a period when her work was featured in American Craft Magazine. While at Riverbend, she taught numerous local artists the techniques of metalworking and jewelry making.

Death
Kreye died on April 3, 2010 in a long-term care facility near Dayton. She was interred in Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum.

In 2023, a portion of her estate was acquired by Sloane Square Gallery, an arts and antiques gallery located in Huntington, West Virginia, where they are currently offered for sale.

Exhibitions

 * 1955 – Barbizon Plaza Art Gallery, New York City, with members of the Craft Students League of the Plainfield Y.W.C.A.
 * 1975 – “Liturgical Art V,” Schumacher Gallery at Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.
 * 1980 – Fifth Street Gallery, Dayton, Ohio.
 * 1984 – Dayton Art Institute (where she demonstrated her technique outside the Museum Store).
 * 1984 – “Religious Art ‘84, Midwest Biennial II,” St. Paul's Church Mart, Cincinnati, Ohio (where she received a Best-in-Show)
 * 1991 – exhibiting and demonstrating jewelry making at the Stillwater Trading Company, Dayton, Ohio.
 * 1993 – UNKNOWN EXHIBITION: Reviewed in the New Art Examiner: “Audrea Kreye's silver serpentine chalice and Laura Marth's giddy aluminum menorahs are celebratory paraphrases of traditional ceremonial vessels…”
 * 1998 – “Works of Faith: Contemporary Judaic Art,” Troy-Hayner Cultural Center, Troy, Ohio.
 * 1999 – “16th Biennial Juried Exhibition of the Liturgical Art Guild,” Schumacher Gallery at Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.
 * 1999 – Wetlands Gallery, Dayton, Ohio (where she was one of the founders).
 * 2001 – “Art in the Park,” DeWeese Park, Dayton, Ohio.
 * 2003 – “Spirited Vessel,” exhibition by Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen at the Yeiser Arts Center, Paducah, Kentucky.
 * 2006 – “Painting with Fire: Masters of Enameling in America, 1930-1980,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California, 2006 (discussed in catalog).

Gallery