Peter Plagens is a true Renaissance man: a painter whose work has been shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974; the staff art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, where he is now Contributing Editor; and 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. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. His paintings were the subject of a current retrospective first shown at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; it traveled to Columbia College of Art in Chicago, and The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Plagens lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Laurie Fendrich.

Frances Colpitt holds the Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. A corresponding editor for Art in America, where her articles and reviews appear regularly, she is also on the board of contributers for artUS. She is the author of Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective(Washington University Press, 1993) and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and is currently at work on a book about hard-edge abstraction in Southern California from 1920 to the present. Her essay, “Hard-Edge Cool,” appears in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Mid-Century, published by Prestel and the Orange County Museum of Art in 2007.

She has organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary American art at venues including the University of Texas at San Antonio; Artpace, San Antonio; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her 2008 exhibition, Material Culture, was the inaugural program at TCU’s gallery, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.

Co-sponsored by TAI Gallery