VAA's 27^th Juried Open Exhibition is fast approaching.  We are very short on entries!  The post mark deadline for entries is March 3.  You may bring your entries to the Wednesday evening, March 3 meeting at Spacetaker rather than mailing them, if you prefer. 

Spacetaker is located at 2101 Winter Street, Houston, 77007.  The program starts at 6:30 p.m.  Spacetaker is a non-profit arts awareness organization that provides resources to local emerging and mid-career artists. They publish an extensive list of artists and art events in Houston on their website.  They also host monthly artist meetings to provide opportunities for education and interaction with artists in our community.   

We're hoping to see all of you, plus your friends, at the March meeting and we love for you to bring guests.

Sincerely,

Ann McBride

Our next meeting will be at Spacetaker Studio, 2101 Winter Street on Wednesday, March 3 at 6:30 PM.

Spacetaker is a 501(c)3 professional organization and Artist Resource Center located in Houston's First Ward whose mission it to provide artists and non-profits access to economic development, continuing education, and networking opportunities to support their professional growth.

For example in 2009:

• Spacetaker helped put over $57,000 in the hands of approximately 160 local artists through programming such as the Winter Holiday Art Market and partner exhibitions with local businesses.
• Spacetaker's Cultured Cocktails Program featured 50 unique nonprofits and raised over $8,000 for local arts organizations.
• Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center (ARC) hosted 24 professional development workshops for artists and arts organizations, as well as 5 family-oriented art events- touching over 1,200 individuals.
• Between the Winter Holiday Art Market, the Artist Resource Center workshops, the Cultured Cocktails program, the Artist SPEAKeasy events, and the Synergy Gala, Spacetaker directly impacted over 7,000 Houstonians. 

Spacetaker website

Spacetaker Facebook

This will be a very informative program.

Come and enjoy the speaker and visit with friends.

You are invited to bring friends to the meetings.

During our February monthly meeting we enjoyed the outstanding presentation by Dr. Tracy Karner, professor of Sociology at the UH. Her web site is: Visual Studies website The subject of her lecture was fascinating and in a way, most of us received a kind of revelation on new usage of the electronic means of disseminating words and images.

These are a few of the things that we learned from Dr. Karner:

-Visual Sociology - the use of the camera to document social life.

-Visual fluency - a necessity - the awareness of the electronic technology to transmit graphical concepts across languages and cultures.

(An engineer, sitting at his home computer in Sugar Land could be looking into the depth of an oil well in Angola at the same time that his partners in China are discussing it on the phone with him and interpreting the same data that they are simultaneously watching on their computer screens.)

- Visual fluency is an interdisciplinary effort.  The department at UH interfaces 30 faculty members from as many as 30 areas of knowledge.

- Dr. Karmer is the editor of the local photography magazine, SPOT, and she asked that VAA members consider submitting articles for publication.

Check out the Facebook page for Visual Studies @  Facebook Visual Studies 

Dr. Karner suggested that we watch the video: A Vision of Students Today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&NR=1

A second lecture in U-Tube:  A Portal to Media Literacy - 66 minutes long, also by professor Wesch is a complete paradigm shift in high education.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s&feature=channel  shows an amazing experiment in education that is producing fundamental changes on how young people are educated today.

Larry Larrinaga