Helping Olga's Gallery

Olga's Gallery was started as a hobby devoted to a subject we feel passionate about - Fine Art. We never expected it to become the huge resource that it has, though we're happy that so many people find our work worthwhile and useful.

We would like to make Olga's Gallery even better. We can't do that without your help. Through all this time, we've done pretty much everything at Olga's Gallery for free. Though we make some money on advertising, most of that goes to paying for the website's hosting and other technical expenses. The labor, the writing, the cost of acquiring reproductions and rights to images has been done solely in our spare time and at our own expense. Which is why updates have been relatively infrequent in the past few years.

Currently, we want to expand Olga's Gallery in three major directions.

1. Russian Avant-Garde. This is a major and important art movement of the 20th Century that's rather poorly covered on both the web and in English-language academia. Since we are already the web's largest collection of Russian art, we feel it's almost our duty to offer a good representation of this movement.
2. Early Italian Painting. This would include art from about the 10th Century to the Early Renaissance, covering the transition from medieval and Byzantine art to some of the most celebrated artwork and painters in all of history.
3. Improving our existing collection. We would like to increase the number and quality of the images we show on our pages. Some of these date back to as early as 1999, when expectations and requirements for images were much lower than they are now. Better quality would help our visitors better appreciate and study the artwork. We would start with the most popular and well-known painters, and work backwards from there.

We also have tentative plans for what we would like to do after that, but small steps are important.

Our goal is to raise $30,000. $10,000 for each of the goals outlined above. This will cover a lot of the expenses involved in acquiring images and access to information. This will also cover the number 1 resource that Olga's Gallery needs to grow: our time.

With a recommended donation of $20, it would take just 1,500 people to fund this project. However, every little bit helps, and every little bit is appreciated!