January 1, 2024

Nancy Pletos is a notable Detroit artist and Wayne State alum. She began studying math at Wayne State, but quickly shifted to art and earned her BA in 1972. She continued her graduate studies at Wayne State with John Egner, and she earned her MFA in painting in 1974. Although she studied painting in her graduate program, Pletos began constructing wooden sculptures in 1973. Her woodwork was soon shown in exhibitions, including a two-person show at the Willis Gallery in 1973, and a solo show entitled “Oh Memory, Oh Memory, Oh Memory'' at the Detroit Artists Market in 1974, among many others. Pletos moved to New York in 1976 and Chicago in 1979, continuing to create and exhibit woodworks along the way. She moved back to Michigan in 2004. Pletos passed away in Royal Oak in 2016, but she will forever be remembered as an innovative artist. 

Pletos composed a variety of woodworks throughout her career: from dollhouses, to large two-dimensional works with organic shapes, to her highly ornamental Furnishings and Small Wood Works, which she began when she moved to New York in 1976. In addition to wood, Pletos frequently incorporated found objects into her art, including glass and old furniture. Her use of found objects is inspired by Detroit’s Cass Corridor movement, along with the Italian Arte Povera, or “poor art” movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Both movements embrace objects that are at times considered trash and repurpose them into magnificent artwork. By incorporating a variety of found objects into her woodwork, Pletos transformed the mundane into the imaginative, and the discarded into the valued. 

Pletos composed her untitled mirror in 1980, one year after her move to Chicago. She maintains the influences of the Cass Corridor and Arte Povera movements through her use of media, but she creates her own unique rendition of them within her work. Spanning at just 2 ⅝ x 4 x 9 ⅞ inches, she constructs the work with oil, enamel, varnish, wood, a mirror, and glass beads. The small scale adds to the intimacy of the mirror as a handheld object. These materials and miniature scale are characteristic of the Small Wood Works Pletos began in 1976. She embellishes the mirror with natural elements, including a stick for the handle and flowers that frame the mirror. Her use of varnish creates a sheen throughout the work, reflecting light along with the mirror itself. One portion of the handle appears to be bound by tape, as if the stick broke in half. Pletos does not try to conceal the handle’s brokenness or her efforts to repair it, but she emphasizes this imperfection with the thick binding between the two pieces. In doing so, she does not frame the stick’s brokenness as a sign of weakness, but as an element that adds to the shape, beauty, and whimsical quality of the mirror. She takes the mundane object of a mirror and transforms it into a whimsical object. Moreover, the use of a mirror may suggest that Pletos is inviting her viewers to look at found objects in the imaginative and innovative ways that she views them. 

Written by Angela Athnasios

Sources: https://www.simonedesousagallery.com/artists/nancy-pletos/nancy-pletos-bio/

https://artcollection.wayne.edu/exhibitions/challengingthenarrative

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/arte-povera/

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