The Dallas Museum of Art and Preservation Link

Last year the Dallas Museum of Art and Preservation Link Inc.(PLI), partnered together to display the efforts of five schools in the South Dallas/ Fair Park area of photographs that the children themselves had taken. These photographs displayed what the children deemed to be beautiful about the community that they lived in. The beautiful things that they perceived was pointedly about their community, themselves, and their culture. I commend the efforts of PLI and the insightful look that has developed in the lives of the children that have taken part in this program. Their partnership with area schools began in 2004 through a program called Point of View. This program allows the voice, that is not often heard to shine through the mainstream single minded ideas about the community as ugly and wasted area. Instead, you are allowed a glimpse of the rose growing out of the concrete. It reminds us that beauty lives everywhere...you just have to open your eyes to see it.

This year Through the Eyes of our Children- Something Beautiful

will be again located in the Mezzanine Level in at the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibit will run from May 14-August 29, 2010. The Opening Recpetion on May 27th from 6:30pm - 8:30pm. Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood Street
May 27th- come out and show your support and take a closer look at something beautiful.

http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_205634 image retrieved from the DMA website.

Visual Literacy and Visual Culture

Visual Literacy & Visual Culture

We have idea of what visual literacy is, so lets get you informed about what is visual culture... Visual culture derives from the idea of our culture as a whole having changed based on the visual. We are constantly fed visual images that ultimately influence how we all live in life. It is said that visual culture began during the age of printmaking (http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Visual_culture). Early work on visual culture has been done by John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972). "Thus, visual images are all around and our understanding of these images is deepened by using visual culture."(from International Congress of Aesthetics 2007 “Aesthetics Bridging Cultures” : Aesthetic Understanding through Visual Culture).

For this posting, I look forward to the commentary that you have concerning the issues of visual culture and the its effects on society at large. Use some practices of visual literacy and visual thinking strategies to discern what relationships the images could possible have with one another. Remember to describe what you see, then pull out those things that are familiar to use, and then tell what meaning you derived from the placement of the images.