Gloria Plevin was born in Pittsburgh in 1934 and raised in Clarksburg, a small city in West Virginia. From a young age, she enjoyed studying the designs and styles in Clarksburg’s furniture shop windows along the town’s main street. Plevin began formal art classes as a business student at Ohio University in the 1950s. After graduation, she moved to Cleveland, a bigger city with more opportunities for artists. Though delayed by marriage to Leon Plevin and four children, Plevin’s intent to become an artist never waned. In 1968 when her family began to spend summers at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, her art blossomed with classes and studio time. In 1985 she opened a summer art gallery near Chautauqua that she ran in the summers, showcasing the work of Chautauquan and Cleveland artists, for 18 years. Plevin works fluidly in acrylics, watercolors, pastels, prints, and drawings that grow from her intense love of the real world. Her work is informed by the subject matter, composition, and colors of artists include Mary Cassatt, Pierre Bonnard, Milton Avery, Alice Neel, and Japanese printmakers. Her favorite subjects have been landscapes of Chautauqua County, botanicals, still lifes, home, family, pets, and friends. Uninterested by the art movements of her time, such as abstract expressionism or geometric abstraction, Plevin’s paintings and prints directly reference their subjects. These painted equivalents she rearranges purposefully and personally, reflecting the life around her that she has created and observed. Plevin’s paintings and prints are in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland State University’s Marshall College of Law, the Butler Institute, the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, the Art Museum of West Virginia University, the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, ARTneo, Zygote Press Collection, and in corporate and private collections across North America. She lives and works in the Shaker Square area of Cleveland.



References:

Busta, William, “Gloria Plevin at ArtNEO: Transformed through Selective Imagination,” in CAN Journal 6(4) Winter 2017/2018.

McClelland, Elizabeth. The Art of Gloria Plevin. Artists Now: Cleveland, 1998.

Busta, William. Gloria Plevin: Art and Essays. Cleveland: ArtNEO, 2019.