Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- Plagens, Peter
- Abstract:
- Peter Plagens is an abstract painter, art critic, professor and novelist based in New York City. The collection consists of art work, exhibition materials, art criticism, published and unpublished novels, correspondence, lectures, course materials, photographs, slides, notebooks, datebooks, journals, and memorabilia.
- Extent:
- 13.4 linear feet (26 document boxes, 10 half document boxes, and 1 oversize flat box)
- Language:
- Materials are in English.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Peter Plagens papers (Collection 2255). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
The Peter Plagens papers consist of art work, exhibition materials, art criticism, published and unpublished novels, correspondence, lectures, course materials, photographs, slides, notebooks, datebooks, journals and memorabilia, ranging in date from 1938 to 2014.
- Biographical / historical:
-
Peter Plagens was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1941 but grew up in Los Angeles after his family moved when he was two years old. His parents, George and Jayne Plagens, who both worked, saved their cash to buy a small house in the city. Peter graduated from John Marshall High School, then paid his way through the University of Southern California (USC) with a partial scholarship from the university and a job at a supermarket.
He received a Bachelor's degree from the USC School of Fine Arts in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1964. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting.
Plagens, an abstract painter, met fellow painter Walter Gabrielson in 1963 at USC when he returned to campus in an attempt to reclaim his undergraduate job in the Psychology Department on a research project called "BC: Analysis of Behavioral Cognition." According to Plagens, he returned to find that Gabrielson had taken his job drawing stimuli for social intelligence tests to be used by the Navy to assess the kind of crew members who could withstand confinement in submarines. The project now required two cartoonists, so Plagens began work on the project again but this time in a cubicle adjacent to Gabrielson. There they began their lifelong friendship.
In 1969 Plagens returned to Los Angeles when Gabrielson found him a teaching job in the Art Department of San Fernando Valley State College, now known as California State University, Northridge. They shared an office on campus and became known informally among art students as the "Pete 'n' Wally Show," and from 1970 they shared a 3,000 square foot studio in Pasadena until Plagens left Northridge in 1978.
Plagens has exhibited his work at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City for over 40 years, and his paintings are part of the permanent collections of many museums and corporations, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California. Plagens' art has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums such as the USC Fisher Gallery, the Akron Art Museum, the Las Vegas Art Museum and Texas Gallery, Houston.
According to Plagens' wife, painter Laurie Fendrich, Peter fell into writing art criticism but he also enjoys it. His first review appeared in Artforum in 1966. His writing has appeared in a multitude of publications including Art in America, Art News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Art and The Wall Street Journal. However, Plagens may be best known as the art critic and senior writer for Newsweek magazine between 1989 and 2003.
Plagens has taught at Middlebury College in Vermont, Hofstra University in New York, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also chaired the art department, California State University at Northridge, USC, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. Notably, in 1998 Plagens was one of four senior fellows in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.
In addition to his work as an artist and educator, Plagens is also the author of five books: Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (1974), Moonlight Blues: An Artist's Art Criticism (1986), Time for Robo (1999), Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast 1945-1970 (2000), The Art Critic (2008 and 2012), and Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (2014).
Plagens works and lives in New York City with his wife, Laurie Fendrich.
- Acquisition information:
- Gift of Peter Plagens and Laurie Fendrich, 2014.
- Processing information:
-
Processed by Kelly Besser in consultation with Genie Guerard and with supervision from Megan Hahn Fraser, 2014.
Additional details and descriptions of certain items were provided by Peter Plagens via email correspondence with Kelly Besser in November and December 2014.
Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices.
We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Problematic Content and Description in UCLA's library collections and archives.
- Arrangement:
-
This collection has been arranged in the following series:
- Series 1: Art Work
- Series 2: Exhibition Materials
- Series 3: Writing
- Series 4: Correspondence
- Series 5: Lectures
- Series 6: Course Materials
- Series 7: Photos and Slides
- Series 8: Notebooks and Datebooks
- Series 9: DRIPS
- Series 10: Memorabilia
- Physical / technical requirements:
-
COLLECTION CONTAINS DIGITAL MATERIALS: This collection contains processed digital materials. All requests to access digital materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Physical location:
- Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Access and use
- Restrictions:
-
Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Terms of access:
-
Property rights to the objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Peter Plagens papers (Collection 2255). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
- Location of this collection:
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A1713 Charles E. Young Research LibraryBox 951575Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575, US
- Contact:
- (310) 825-4988