Gloria Plevin

Archived in 2000

Biography

Gloria Plevin’s (b. 1934) vivid acrylics, watercolors, pastels, prints and drawings grow from her desire to advance art’s power to capture and celebrate the life around us. Informed by artists as diverse as Mary Cassatt, Pierre Bonnard, Fairfield Porter, and Japanese printmakers, her favorite subjects have been landscapes of Chautauqua County, botanicals, still lifes, home and family, pets, and friends. As Gloria explains in a YouTube video, “It’s a beautiful world; it deserves to be painted.”

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, ARTneo: The Museum of Northeast Ohio Art, Zygote Press Collection, and in corporate and private collections across North America.

A longtime resident of Shaker Heights and Shaker Square who grew up in Clarksburg, West Virginia, Plevin’s art career has spanned over 50 years. For 18 years, she was the director/ owner of the Gloria Plevin Gallery in Chautauqua, NY. The summer gallery showcased Cleveland and Chautauqua-area artists and was listed as a ‘Must-See Gallery’ in The 100 Best Small Art Towns in America (John Villani, 1996).

Plevin has had solo exhibitions at ARTneo: The Museum of Northeast Ohio Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, Chautauqua Institution, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, the Verne Collection, and West Virginia University.

Books about Plevin’s work include Gloria Plevin: Art and Essays with essays by the artist and introductions by William Busta and Christopher Richards (Cleveland: ARTneo, 2019) and the monograph The Art of Gloria Plevin written by Elizabeth McClelland (Cleveland: Artists Now, 1998).