About Me and this Blog

I find that I am attracted to many aspects of culture and can only fully appreciate art of any type if I can place it in a context from where I can make my own connections, and see corresponding elements in other mediums and areas of study.   I’m interested in how art and all other disciplines interact and affect one another.  How artists impact the sciences, and vice-versa.  Or how certain artists’ practice is affected by certain writers.  Or how certain historic events give way to a whole artistic movement (in all mediums).  I like the connections, the correspondences between things.  And while traveling, the wonders of the artificial world, all that is created by the human hand, with its dirt, pollution, and magnificent structures, offers such a great opportunity for me to discover or understand these connections.  I see art as the foundation of what makes us human.  It is that ability to think abstractly, to envision oneself beyond the now, and the skill to build that which we imagine.  I believe that art still needs all these three elements today, as it once was at the beginning of the archaeological record.  Art is still our material culture.

Pierre Leroux describes what I would like this blog to be – the intersection among the different aspects of human knowledge and creativity.

“Poetry is the mysterious wing that glides at will in the whole world of the soul, in that infinite sphere, one part of which is colors, another sounds, another movements, another judgments, and so forth, all vibrating simultaneously, according to certain laws, so that a vibration in one region communicates itself to another region. The privilege of art is to feel and express these relationships, which are deeply hidden in the very unity of life. From these harmonic vibrations of the diverse regions of the soul an accord results, and this accord is life; and when this accord is expressed, it constitutes art. And it so happens that when this accord is expressed, it is a symbol, and the form of its expression is rhythm, which itself partakes of the symbol: that is why art is the expression of life, the reverberation of life, life itself. Poetry, which chooses for its instrument the word and creates with words the symbol and the rhythm, is an accord, as is music, as is painting, as are all the other arts: so that the fundamental principle of all art is the same, and all the arts get fused into art, all the poetries into poetry. “

-Pierre Leroux, “De la poésie de notre epoque”, 1831

Baudelaire was influenced by this socialist philosopher when he wrote his famous poem, Correspondences:

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.

Like those deep echoes that meet from afar
In a dark and profound harmony,
As vast as night and clarity,
So perfumes, colors, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows,
And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,

Possessing the diffusion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin,
Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses.

This blog also offers me the opportunity to engage in the other form of “Correspondence” – staying in touch!!!

I will soon start posting the work of artists whose work I like with short reviews.  If interested in being considered, please email me jpegs and an artist statement.

- OlgaStefanConsulting at yahoo dot com -

About me:

Since 2009, I have been living in Zurich, Switzerland with my husband and two sons. Before this, from 2005-2008, I was the executive director of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, and the executive director of Around the Coyote Arts Festival from 1998-2003. From 2003-2005, when I took time off to be with my young son, I freelanced as the grant writer for Woman Made Gallery. I’ve curated several exhibitions, including Just Another Brick in the Wall: Models for Artistic Production in Romania, Drawn Together, Return of the Yellow Peril, Fire It Up: Ceramic as Material in Contemporary Art, For a Limited Time Only at the Highland Park Art Center, featuring ephemeral installations, Palpable Disequilibrium: Contemporary Art in Romania, an international exhibition at Sonnenschein Gallery at Barat College and LIPAGallery in Chicago, Resurrection at Yello Gallery and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Please Print, April is the Cruelest Month, and many others at ATC Space. I have also served as juror for several festivals, shows, and granting agencies.

In the press:
Around The Coyote – Perform Ink
Arts Districts – Chicago Business
A New Animal – Chicago Reader
A Leaner Coyote – Chicago Reader
Shooting the Breeze – Chicago Sun-Times
Around The Coyote – Inside Publications
Arts Professional’s Story – Chicago Artists’ Resource
Artists House
Artists House Panel Discussion
U of C Student Newspaper
Bad At Sports
Artscope
Bat At Sports
Interview with Dan and Lia Perjovschi in conjunction with Palpable Disequilibrium: Contemporary Art in Romania, FNewsMagazine 2003
Time Out Chicago
ArtSlant
Columbia Chronicle
Review of Around the Coyote exhibition
Press for For A Limited Time Only
Chicago Artists’ Coalition – Wikipedia
Lonesome Coyote – Chicago Reader
New ED Begins at ATC – Inside Publications
Around The Coyote Celebrates Annual Fall Festival – Artscope
Around The Coyote, a brief review
About Around the Coyote – Inside Publications 2001
Around The Coyote Debuts Winter Arts Festival – Artscope
Artists say Cut – Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun Times
Artstyle Chicago
Artfacts.net
Adapting the Borders: Director’s Vision takes fest deeper into the community… – Chicago Tribune

As Juror, I made selections for the Elmhurst Artists’ Guild National Art Premiere: Elmhurst Artists’ Guild and the Evanston Arts Council.