"Blue Stocking" Art Salon

For the last 7 years, the artist, Lori Wolfson and I have been having coast-to-coast chats (she's west; I'm east) about art, artists, and how we handle the challenges and qualities this focus gives to our lives.

This summer, we bantered around the idea of inviting other women artists to join us for some juicy conversations - the kind they had in the famous 17th and 18th century literary salons in Europe and England, which were based on the Italian invention of the 16th century.

Finally, we agreed it was time to do it.

Here's how it works:

Lori and I will show up the first and third Wednesday of the month, on a bridgeline, at 3:30pm ET / 2:30 pm CT / 1:30pm MT / 12:30pm PT

You are invited - free, of course - to join us.

Sign up here and we'll send you immediate access to the bridgeline phone number, dates, and times.

The conversations will be recorded.
And, we will want you to ask questions and jump in with your ideas too!

Some Questions We Want to Explore

• - What does it mean to be an artist?
• - How do you approach your work?
• - How does the art you make relate to your personal story?
• - How has your relationship to your art evolved over time?
• - How do you work with resistance?
• - How does support of your work, or lack thereof, affect you?
• - What function does art have in society?
• - What are the payoffs, or drawbacks, of learning from other artists, past and present?
• - What is the relationship between skill and inspiration?
• - How does art relate to the "real world?"
• - Where does art-as-we-have-known-it fit in to this Brave New World?

For Your Enlightenment:
A Very Short History of Salons, Art Salons, and Blue Stockings!

Besides giving women an arena of influence (women were the center: they selected the guests, decided which subjects to discuss, and directed the discussions), salons encouraged socializing between the sexes, challenged the social hierarchy by mixing nobles and bourgeois together, and helped lay the foundation for the enlightenment. Nice job!

The original "blue-stocking" (les bas-bleu), originated with the Parisian salon of Madeleine de Scudéry in 1652, and later was adopted by English society. For the next 300 years, blue stocking became synonymous with "intellectual woman."

The salon became an informal university for ambitious women, where they could read their own works, as well as hear the works and ideas of other intellectuals, exchange ideas, and receive and give criticism.

The discussion salons were separate from the fine art, "French Salons," also founded in the 17th century; which became the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world, featuring only the work of artists accepted into the Salon according to the very rigid rules of the day.

Later, in the 1800s, radical and dissenting artists shied away from these traditional institutions and created their own venues apart from these Salons, which they felt had grown stale and lifeless.

Now Lori and I are going to update and bring together the intellectual discussion of a salon with a focus on fine art and its ramifications in our 21st Century lives.