By Melissa Powell

Calkins Hall is now the home to the new fine arts department library.

Professor Laurie Fendrich and her husband, Peter Plagens, who is an art critic at Newsweek, came up with the idea of having a departmental library.

“For a long time it has been very frustrating for me as an art teacher because a picture is worth a thousand words,” Fendrich said. “Art is based on copying what other artists have done. Observing and watching other art is how artists become artists, which is why I wanted a library.”

Currently there are 401 volumes in the library, which collectively are valued at approximately $5,000. These books consist of caveman drawings, collections of photography and graphic design, as well as renaissance and art history. A majority of these books were donated by Plagens.

“I think it’s important to have an art library for art students because it is easy to access and provides volumes of information in a concentrated area and has books on art that the University library doesnt even have,” Mariel Maffeton, junior public relations major with a minor in fine arts, said.

Plagens worked for 10 years at Newsweek and decided to start doing freelance writing. While at Newsweek he built a library and when he left, the employers did not want his books. He decided to donate these books to the University, which is where Fendrich stepped in and convinced the fine arts department to buy the books and create a library.

Fendrich said she wanted to create a library separate from the Axinn Library.

“If I had given the collection to Axinn, the collection would have been taken apart and distributed throughout the shelves of the library,” she said. “The other alternative was it would have been kept as a whole collection, but it would have been sent to the library off campus.”

The library is open Monday through Thursday and is located in the seminar room on the first floor of Calkins Hall. Undergraduate students enrolled in fine arts and art history courses have absolute privilege to use this library. Students outside of the department who are interested in checking out books must contact a faculty member in the department first. The library is currently unnamed, but Fendrich is hoping to give it a name soon.

“So many of the art history and art classes are cores, so that the school’s selection of art books gets used by a lot of people,” Marielle Davis, one of the student aides at the new library said. “We have a lot of rare books that Professor Fendrich gave from her own collection that you couldn’t find in Axinn.”

The new fine arts library allows students to research artists and paintings seperate from the works at Axinn Library. (Harry Tanielyan/The Chronicle)