Artist and preservation warrior Barton Faist, famous locally for his battle to save Tree Studios, stood up last week at a Chicago Artists Coalition board meeting to champion a new cause. “I was asked to come tonight to discuss the possibility of reviewing Olga,” he announced to the ten board members and two staffers (including executive director Olga Stefan) seated around the conference table at CAC’s new offices. But as soon as Faist launched into a description of his encounters with Stefan during her first 15 months on the job, outgoing chair Lynn Merel cut him off. “I’m not sure this is appropriate,” Merel said. “We’re only doing the election of board members tonight.” Advised that his issue would “get a better hearing if it’s an agenda item,” Faist took his seat, squelched until the board meets in late December, when he’ll try again to get Stefan unseated.
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Since her arrival in August 2005, Stefan, a former Around the Coyote head, has aggressively taken control of the foundering CAC ship. She says she was honored to step into the shoes of founding director Arlene Rakoncay, who’d been there 27 years, she says, “but I wasn’t prepared for what I would find.” CAC, with an average member age of 58, was understaffed, technologically challenged, and had racked up a $24,000 operating deficit. Stefan began cutting costs–moving the office to smaller quarters, changing printers for the monthly newsletter, taking over bookkeeping duties herself–and hired her husband, Oliver Bosche, to build a new Web site. That move raised some eyebrows, but she says the redesign was needed to bring in younger members and generate income. Plus, Bosche gave them a great deal. “For $7,500 we got a Web site that does just about everything CAR does,” she says, referring to the city’s Chicago Artists Resource site, built at a cost of $200,000 and initially seen by many as a threat to CAC. Stefan says the coalition is now operating in the black, collecting income from its online galleries (up from about 60 artists to 269) and annual dues (membership has increased by 250 to 2,300). The job bank, previously contained in a three-ring binder, can now be accessed online, and workshops have tripled from about 10 per year to about 30.
roiling in discontent. But if the rank and file is aroused, you wouldn’t
Ronald H. Shechtman, their attorney, says a photo spotted on the Internet by choreographer John Carrafa was the catalyst for the complaint: “He thought it was the New York show, but when he looked closely he didn’t recognize any of the actors. Then he came out and saw the Chicago show and was furious.”
