Peter Plagens, Newsweek magazine art critic, and Elaine Levin, American ceramics historian, will each give a lecture on Wednesday, February 12, on the Scripps College campus. Levin will offer a slide-lecture, "Eco-Rhythmics: Color and Texture in Clay," at 1:30 p.m. in the Hampton Room of the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Commons. Plagens will present "Confessions of an Abstract Painter" at 7:30 p.m. in Baxter Hall. Both lectures are free and open to the public. For additional program information, please call the Gallery office, (909) 607-3397.
Called by the New York Times "one of art-writing’s few gifted comedians" for his first novel Time for Robo, Peter Plagens has firmly established himself in the art world as a veritable triple threat: painter, art-critic, and arts educator. Plagens joined Newsweek in 1989 as a general editor and was named senior writer in December 1997. He has exhibited his paintings at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City for the past 27 years and his works are part of the permanent collections of many museums and corporations, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Chase Manhattan Bank; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. He has written numerous journals and essays for publication and is the author of Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism and Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast 1945-70, among others.
Plagens is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships-two for painting, one for art criticism; he also earned a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting and in 1998 was named one of four Senior Fellows in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. In addition to his work for Newsweek, Plagens is currently a contributing editor for Artforum magazine. Plagen’s appearance at Scripps is sponsored by the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery and the Scripps College Department of Art and Art History, and made possible by the Harper Lecture Fund.
Art historian and arts educator Elaine Levin is author of a number of publications exploring American ceramics, including The History of American Ceramics, 1607 to the Present: From Pipkins and Bean Pots to Contemporary Forms and Paul Soldner: A Retrospective. A frequent speaker at universities, museums, and festivals both here and abroad, Levin has been invited to lecture at such prestigious institutions as the Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, Canada; the National Academy of Art and Design in Oslo, Norway; and the San Francisco Art Institute, among others. In addition, Levin was a featured speaker for the Smithsonian Museum Lecture Series on "The Connoisseurship of American Ceramics." This event is sponsored by the Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation, and presented in conjunction with the 59th Ceramics Annual, an exhibition at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery from January 25 through April 6.
Scripps College’s Fine Arts Foundation, created in 1935, presents the afternoon lecture series as part of its mission to stimulate public interest in art and to raise funds to foster art education and programming at Scripps College.
The Scripps College 59th Ceramic Annual is the longest-running and best-known ceramics exhibition in the United States. This year’s guest curator is ceramist Karen Koblitz, and she has selected pieces by 11 American artists whose works thematically explore nature’s patterns through sculptural abstraction. Included in this exhibition are sculptures by Susan Beiner, Margaret Boozer, Robert Devers, Eddie Dominguez, Cary Esser, Amanda Jaffe, Marc Leuthold, Mary Roehm, JoAnn Schnabel, Virginia Scotchie, and Mike Vatalaro. The Williamson Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, from 1-5 p.m, closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission is free.