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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Contemporary Photography Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions / Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography / Artists and Curators / Toronto, ON / Deadline Date: Thursday, September 30, 2010

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography is a non-profit artist-run centre committed to the advancement of photographic art. We encourage the submission of exhibition proposals from emerging, mid-career and established artists and curators who are innovative in their use of materials and approach to subject matter. Gallery 44 views photography within the larger context of contemporary artistic practices and relevant cultural issues in today's society.

Submission Guidelines
Please submit the following:

1. A maximum of twenty slides or digital images (CD must be readable on MAC OSX) representing a recent body of work or a specific project. Digital images should be: RGB, jpeg format no larger than 1024 x 768 pixels at 300 dpi. They should be numbered 01 to 20 (01_tree, 02_house, 03_car etc.) Gallery 44 does not accept original artwork.
2. An image list indicating title, year, medium and dimensions.
3. An artist's statement, curatorial statement, or other written description.
4. A physical description of the proposed exhibition, including the number of works, the space required and any unusual installation requirements.
5. A curriculum vitae, resume or biography of the artist(s) and/or curator (including all artists if it is a curated exhibition).
6. A self-addressed envelope (SASE) with sufficient return postage. Without an SASE we will not return submission packages and will dispose of submission materials appropriately.

Gallery 44 welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with other arts and community organizations. Please contact us to discuss your project.

Gallery 44 will take reasonable care with submission materials; however, we cannot accept responsibility for damage or loss to original photographic prints. Gallery 44 does not accept submissions by fax or email.

Late submissions will not be accepted. Submissions must be postmarked by the deadline. Please clearly label your envelope with the call that you are applying for. Artists are paid in accordance with the CARFAC Fee Schedule.

Please see Submissions on http://www.gallery44.org for a floor plan of the gallery and further information.

Contact for submissions:
Alice Dixon, Exhibition Coordinator
alice@gallery44.org | 416.979.3941

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite #120
Toronto, ONM5V 3A8

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Oregon Book Awards Submission Deadline

Important Date! Oregon Book Awards Submission Deadline Is Fast Approaching.

OBA Deadline Date Applications for the 2010 Oregon Book Awards must be received by 5 pm on Friday, August 27, 2010.

For submission guidelines click here!

The Oregon Book Awards honor outstanding books by Oregon authors.

The finalists for the 2010/11 Oregon Book Awards will be announced in early 2011 and the winners will be announced at the 2010/11 Oregon Book Awards ceremony, to be held in the spring of 2011.

Awards are presented in the following genres: Poetry, Fiction, General Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction, Children's Literature, Young Adult Literature and Drama.

For more information contact Susan Denning at susan@literary-arts.org or by phone at 503-227-2583.

Attention Native American artists and craftspeople

President Obama has signed into law legislation that promotes economic opportunities for Native American artists and craftspeople and protects consumers from fraudulent art and craftwork. The Indian Arts and Crafts Amendments Act and Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 increases economic development and job opportunities for Native Americans who produce and market authentic Indian art and craftwork while cracking down on counterfeit marketers who are hurting sales of this authentic Indian work. The law helps tribal leaders combat violence and increase safety on Indian reservations by providing law enforcement resources. The total market for American Indian and Alaska Native arts and crafts in the United States is estimated at a billion dollars, with an unknown but substantial amount of those sales going to misrepresented, non-authentic works.

The new law also strengthens the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which makes it illegal to sell or offer or display for sale any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian-produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian Tribe.

The Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB), a federal agency under the Department of the Interior, administers and enforces the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Before this new legislation was enacted, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the only federal law enforcement agency with statutory authority to investigate alleged Indian Arts and Crafts Act violations. Under the new law, the IACB may refer potential Act violations for investigation to all federal law enforcement officers, including those from Department of the Interior bureaus, and can work with federal law enforcement officers who uncover violations of the Act in the course of their regular duties.
In addition, the new legislation strengthens the penalties for violations of the Act by imposing harsher penalties on those involved in more significant sales of arts and crafts misrepresented as Indian-made. For fraudulent works with a total sales transaction amount of $1,000 or more, a first-time violation by an individual will result in a fine of up to $250,000, imprisonment of up to five years, or both. A first-time violation by a business will result in a fine of up to $1 million.
For smaller cases with first-time violators, if the total sale amount is less than $1,000, an individual will face a fine of up to $25,000, imprisonment of up to a year, or both, and a business will face a fine of up to $100,000. In the case of a subsequent violation, regardless of the amount for which any item is offered or displayed for sale, or sold, an individual could be fined, imprisoned for up to 15 years, or both; and a business could be fined up to $5 million.

Established by Congress in 1935, the IACB promotes authentic Native American art and craftwork of members of federally recognized Tribes, as well as to implementing the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. For more information, see www.iacb.doi.gov

Monday, August 9, 2010

Spiders, Robots, Oh My!

Search engines find your web site using little programs called "robots" or "spiders" that search the internet for new content. These are busy little guys, continually scouring the internet for the latest and greatest information. If you know how to cater to them you'll get your site noticed by search engines.

First and foremost there's one concept that you cannot go wrong with:

The more human-friendly your site is, the more search engine friendly it will be.

It's sort of a simple----search engine spiders are trying to look at each web site they encounter as if they were human. If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. Here's what I mean:

Humans like fresh content. Human visitors like new content to read. You wouldn’t like reading the same article every month in your favorite magazine, would you? If you put new pages and text on your web site on a regular basis, people will come to your site more often to read it.

Likewise, the more often you update and add new content the more often search engines will search your site and index your new content. If you post new stories on your blog a couple times a week, Google might visit your site once a week to see what is new and add it to their search results. Google will visit larger sites (like, for example, CNN.com) several times a day because the web site is updated continually throughout the day.

So, to get your web site visited regularly by a spider, you want to update your site as often as possible. If you stop adding new content for 6 six months, a spider will act like a human visitor would---they'll visit less and less frequently until they stop visiting completely.

Making content accessible:

Humans like to be able to find new content. If you create a new page and you put a link from your home page to that new page, it's easy for people to find the new page. Whereas if you put a new page on your site but you don't link to it, human visitors can't find that page.

Spiders find content by following links too. Once you've got a new page on your site, you want to make sure there is a link to the new content so a spider can find it.

One thing you can do to make sure search engines visit all the important pages on your site is create a site map. A site map is simply a list of links to each of the important pages on your site.

A search engine that finds this link will quickly gain access to all the pages on the web site. The spider can just go down the list. A site map is also helpful for your human visitors. If someone cannot find the information they are looking for, a quick visit to the site map can point them in the right direction.

Outgoing links:

If you're giving a human visitor useful information, you would probably link to other resources around the internet that would also be useful for your visitors to visit. If you have a lot of content, it's expected that it will include links that leave your site. Without outgoing links you become a stagnant dead in the water website---links go in but they don't go out. Since links to other resources off of your site are helpful to humans, search engine spiders want to see them on your site.

For more information on this, you may want to visit these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps

http://webthang.org/downloads/RobotsReferenceWorksheet.pdf

http://www.barkerenterprisesinc.com/uploads/Spiders_-_CEM_08.09.pdf

http://www.epdfsearch.com/en/pdf/SEO+Tips-3.html