Peter Plagens and Laurie Fendrich

Bios

Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter who lives in New York and works in New York and Callicoon Center, NY. She is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at Hofstra University, and is a 2016 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts. She has had several solo exhibitions, and her paintings and drawings were the subject of a twenty-year retrospective, accompanied by a 96-page catalog, at Scripps College in Claremont, CA, in 2010. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as The New York Times, Artforum, Artnews, Art in America, ARTS Magazine, The New York Sun, The New York Observer and Partisan Magazine. In addition, she is the author of several essays on the role of art and artists in society, as well as short stories about painters and the art world.

Peter Plagens(b. 1941, Dayton, OH) is a painter who’s shown with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974, and was also art critic for Newsweek Magazine (1989-2003).

His most recent solo exhibitions were at Nancy Hoffman (January 25 – March 10, 2018), and The Ohio State University, Lima (August 31 – October 11, 2018. His work was the subject of a retrospective in 2004-2005 at the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles; the exhibition traveled to Columbia College in Chicago, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio.

He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (painting), the National Endowment for the Arts (painting, art criticism), The Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital (arts writing) and the National Arts Journalism Program. Plagens is the author of two books of art criticism—Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 and Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism— as well as a novel, Time for Robo. His online novel, The Art Critic, was published as an e-book by Hol Art Books in 2012, and his monograph, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, was published by Phaidon, in May, 2014.

For the Fall semester, 2015, Plagens was a visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute. Currently, he writes about museum exhibitions for The Wall Street Journal.

Plagens earned a BFA degree in fine art from the University of Southern California in 1962, and an MFA degree from Syracuse University in 1964. In 2016, his papers were acquired by the UCLA Library Special Collections in Art. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Laurie Fendrich. Plagens and Ms. Fendrich had a two-person exhibition at the University Art Gallery at Sonoma State University in California in 2017; it traveled to Western Michigan University in 2018.