About
Winfred Lucile Mohr was born in Houston, Texas on 19 April, 1931. Her parents began calling her Fredi at an early age. Fredi died peacefully at her Eugene, Oregon home on 17 January 2025. She almost made it to age 94, yet she remained positive, lively, and engaging her whole life… Fredi remained “sharp as a tack” until the end. We celebrate her amazing life in many ways, and one fun way is to continue adding more content on this site. Thanks for your interest and love for this amazing person and/or her unique creations!
Fredi married Marshall Leaf in 1960 and changed her name to Winfred Mohr Leaf, or Fredi Leaf, for short. Fredi began creating art as a young child and showed her skill in many drawings, paintings, and print-making in high school. As she gained more recognition and talent, she kept creating and developed a wide range of styles and media in her ever-expanding portfolio of truly impressive work.
At the age of 18, Fredi won the Hunt Speedball Pen National Scholastic Contest and received cash, art supplies, and a scholarship to the Art Center Association in 1949. The two stenciled pieces below were part of her winning portfolio (from her senior year at Charles H. Milby High School in the East End neighborhood of Houston).
After attending the Art Center Association at the University of Louisville, Kentucky to study fine arts, Fredi went on to draw and paint in college and eventually moved to Chicago, Illinois, USA in 1956. “I wanted to work in a big city and I figured New York was too big, and I knew some people in Chicago…” she explained.
Fredi lived in the Old-Town neighborhood and held a variety of jobs in Chicago in the late 1950s, including working as a commercial studio artist, drawing labels, posters, and advertisement graphics until the mid-nineteen sixties. Fredi continued to study painting, and worked with teachers such as Rudolph Penn at the Old Town Triangle Association in Chicago’s Near-North and Lincoln Park neighborhood.
In 1961, Fredi and her husband Marshal Leaf moved into a large and very old brownstone house near the south end of Lincoln Park, where she developed an art studio in the front room of the third-floor of the home. Fredi continued to be a very prolific artist, and she created countless paintings, drawings, and sculptures in her home studio for more than half a century. The Leafs also raised their two children in Chicago (daughter, Erika and son, Seabrook), who both love art and regularly use their creative skills, which Fredi inspired in them from an early age.
Painting and making a large variety of other creative art forms became one of Fredi’s main passions in life. For more than 80 years she made art and was endlessly prolific, creating thousands of beautiful, inspiring, and thought-provoking unique paintings, murals, drawings, sculptures, quilts, folk art, etc. over her long career. Fredi also learned to be an excellent seamstress, department store window dresser, painter, and 3-D sculptor folk artist.
She has vast experience in hobby art, commercial art, pieces to sell at art fairs and shows, graphic art, gift art for friends and family, art for donation to charities, book illustrations, drawings and paintings in art classes, commissioned art, collage, a dazzling amount of constructed masks and figures, making promotional signs and flyers, 3-D textured paintings, folk art with found objects and materials, sculptures, masks, garments, embroidery, fabric art, and much more. She has accomplished a vast mindboggling body of work, combining many different skills, forms, and influences blended into her own highly varied and experimental freeform styles.
Fredi’s style could be described as “all over the map”, and indeed she did a lot of traveling (first alone and then later with her husband, Marshall and later with her tow kids), which undoubtedly was one of many things that influenced the divesity of her work. Fredi was a single young artist in Chicago, so she held other jobs to survive, and she found various creative work, such as illustrating cartoony shopping ads and flyers, decorating departments store window displays, and painting large sets of truly bizarre trading cards for kids in the
Fredi also worked at the Chicago History Museum (http://www.chicagohs.org/) in the Textile Conservation Lab as a conservation technician for over 32 years (1987-2019), conserving garments, dolls, and other artifacts, especially textiles representing fascinating parts of Chicago’s historical evolution. Her skills and passion for art, nostalgia, collecting, conserving, meticulous organization and record-keeping combined with her generosity, friendly good-natured spirit, along with love and respect for museums and people made Fredi one of the most appreciated loved, and memorable staff members in the C.H.M.’s long history.
Fredi’s paintings and drawings took a back seat to her folk art starting in the 1990s, as she focused more on making three-dimensional figures, masks, and other unique pieces, often using found and recycled materials. She also has a “green thumb,” and keeps her home and yard filled with healthy ornamental plants and trees. This amazing multimedia artist (now in her 90s) still creates and shares her colorful and uniquely whimsical art, and she currently lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Fredi’s paintings and other works are widely distributed in the collections of friends and family around the USA, and many of her pieces remain in Chicago collections while others are stored and displayed in Oregon, Washington, and California (and shown on this web site). This web site, FrediLeaf.org, is a continually growing virtual gallery, with more images of her historic and contemporary works added every year.
