Freilicher completed her undergraduate education at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1947. The next year she studied at the Hans Hofmann schools in New York and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She also attained a Masters degree in art education from Columbia University, New York.
The first exhibition solely of her work was presented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in 1952. Despite her adherence to an essential realism during the period of Abstract Expressionism's dominance, her work was regularly presented by that gallery through the 1960s, and in group shows including the Whitney Museum of American Art annual of 1955, and at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, the same year. Over the succeeding three decades her lyrical, painterly landscapes and still lifes have enjoyed ever-widening audience and recognition. Her subject matter is consistently drawn from her immediate visiual experience of New York's Greenwich Village, where she lives in the winter months, but more frequently of Water Mill, Long Island, where she passes summers,
In addition to easel painting, Freilicher has given particular attention to illustrating books in collaboration with poets, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Skowhegan (Maine) School; Carnegie Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore. Freilicher served a three-year term, 1985-88, on the Academy's Council.
She has received an American Association of University Women Fellowship, and in 1976, a National Endowment for the Arts grant. The Academy awarded her its Saltus Medal in the annual exhibition of 1987. She was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1989.
