Stefan Eicher ’90 Interview by – Nupur Agarwal, Class of 2021 Stefan Eicher, is an artist who helped found the arts organization Art for Change and currently teaches in the Art Department at Woodstock School. Stefan has an MFA in Visual Art and an MBA in International Development. Following his brother’s footsteps, Stefan took the sciences at Woodstock and only discovered his passion for art during his time as a student in college. He describes art as a medium that speaks truth about the world, doing so quietly. In addition to teaching, Stefan continues to serve on the board and help with program development and strategic planning for Art for Change in New Delhi, a platform to address social issues through art. Over time the platform has evolved from activism through art to a forum to ask deeper questions about what it means to be human and how we are to live together.
so quietly. I think that makes an incredible combination, beauty and truth.
Did Woodstock play a role in shaping you as an artist? Ironically I never took an art class at Woodstock. I followed in my brother’s footsteps and pursued the sciences. Physics came easiest of the three, and I thoroughly enjoyed how passionate our physics teacher Dr.Viney was about the subject—as well as the shenanigans we got away with in class because of his absent-mindedness. It just so happened that throughout my four years at Woodstock Physics was consistently scheduled in the same period as Art. It was only in college that I started taking art classes. I enjoyed them so much I added Art to Physics for a double-major.
What sparked your interest in art?
What is Art for Change and what inspired it?
I had always enjoyed creating as a child, but it never seemed very important to the people around me, so it felt very peripheral growing up. It was only as an adult that I started to understand the profound joy of creating something of lasting beauty, something that you bring to life, that then exists separate from you. But also something that creates and carries meaning, that expresses ideas, that has the power to speak. Art says things, whether you want it to or not. The best art speaks truth about the world, about who we are and who we are meant to be, and it does
Art for Change is the result of three things coming together: our very human need for community, creativity, and a sense of purpose. Several years after college three friends with whom I used to pull all-nighters painting in the Art Department basement at college wanted to get together for a reunion. We picked a theme, spent a week painting together in a lake-side barn in the Indiana State Forest, and followed it with an exhibition where we sold half our paintings and recouped our costs. That mix of intense comradery, creativity, and collective reflection
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