Call for Artists 2022

Call for Artists 2022

Call for Artists: An International Online Juried Art Exhibition

54th Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association

Connecting & Sharing – Envisioning the Futures of Visual Literacy

10-12 August 2022

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

(onsite and online)

Connecting & Sharing – Envisioning the Futures of Visual Literacy is the third international online juried art exhibition organized by the International Visual Literacy Association. The exhibition is open to 2D works and videos (5 min max), including but not limited to painting, drawing, photography, prints, collage, screen art, and related digital media. The exhibition will be publicly available on the KunstMatrix online exhibition platform, in which IVLA will feature its 3D virtual gallery space. The jurors will present a virtual tour of the exhibition during the International Visual Literacy Association’s annual conference in August, 2022 and there will be an opportunity to present during a round-table discussion. The exhibition is free to enter, but selected artists will be required to register for the conference and to pay the conference fee to present their works in the online exhibition. The exhibition is open to emerging as well as established artists. To learn more about the conference, visit https://ivla.org/conference.

Jurors: Visual Messages will be juried by Peter Capreau, curator, Museum Leuven (Belgium); Petronio Bendito, designer, artist, and curator, Purdue University (USA); and Dana Statton Thompson, Vice-President of IVLA.

Conference and exhibition theme

The past two years of ongoing restrictions caused by the worldwide pandemic have shown the importance of the visual in the everyday. Our lives have become more visual than ever before – from intense visual-sharing practices with relatives and friends, video conferencing and online education, to the visual presence of pandemic contexts in cityscapes, artistic practices in local communities, media feeds including charts and graphs, and creation of remixed images as a commentary to the crises. It has become clear that we increasingly need visual literacy in terms of image creation, reception and visual thinking. Therefore, in these current unpredictable (visual) times, we aim for the impossible – to envision the futures of visual literacy.

We invite scholars, educators, students, and practitioners from all over the world to discuss theoretical insights and to share research, artistic, and educational practices around the concept of visual literacy and/or in dialogue with multimodality, multi-sensory experiences and multiliteracies. The concept of visual literacy has been used for over five decades in education, art, museum studies, information design, photography, and new literacies research, but currently we have reached the point when we need to (re)build and (re)discover the (new) connections between the variety of theories, disciplinary traditions and educational practices in visual literacy and beyond.

About IVLA and annual conferences

The International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) was founded by John Debes of Kodak and Clarence Williams of the University of Rochester. Lida Cochrane, an early and long-time member, recalled that Debes was writing programs at Kodak expounding the ideas that “visuals are a language … in order to use and create pictures … you are using a language and … visual literacy then came into being.” In 1968, Debes and Williams, along with a selected group of people interested in various aspects of visuals in education and communication met to plan a conference on visual literacy. This group initiated IVLA with the first conference in March 1969, when about 350 people from many disciplines gathered in Rochester to present papers and discuss their theories and applications of visuals. Since then, the association members and participants have traveled the world. Symposia and then conferences have been held each year and starting in 2001, the annual conference became truly international when it began to travel outside the US every third year. Conferences have been hosted in England, Sweden, South Africa, Cyprus, Brazil, Canada, among others, and many states in the U.S. Connecting & Sharing – Envisioning the Futures of Visual Literacy is our 54th conference, hosting the third online art exhibit.

Exhibition Information

Entry Fee: Free; accepted entries will be required to pay the conference fee
Entry Deadline: 28 February 2022

Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2022

Contact Email:  info@ivla.org or ivla2022@jyu.fi 

Jurors’ Virtual Tour: August 10-12, during IVLA 2022 Conference

Conference Website: https://ivla.org/conference and https://ivlaconference.org

Qualification and Requirements

    • Artists 18 years and older are eligible. 
  • Entries must have been created within the last three years. 
  • Artists must provide professional quality images of the works depicted. 
  • Entries must have not been displayed in previous online exhibition(s).
  • Physical and digital works are accepted, including but not limited to painting, drawing, photography, prints, collage, screen art, and related digital media (e.g, video, 5 min max).
  • Works for sale are accepted, but not required. IVLA does not facilitate sales transactions or retain a commission. Indicate in the submission form if work is for sale. 
  • Artists must sign and submit the copyright release as part of the submission form. 
  • Current IVLA membership is not required to participate at the Annual Conference as a presenter or an exhibiting artist; however, it is strongly encouraged. IVLA membership information is available here.
  • Selected artists are required to register for the conference to present their works in the online exhibition.

Work Submission Requirements

  • Submit your work online using this FORM
  • Submit up to three entries per artists
  • Videos, no more than 5 min. 
  • No watermarks, no decorative frames
  • Specify the medium in the label (e.g. MillerJoe _01_Drawing)
    • Do not upload videos. Instead, send a hyperlink to your video for review. 
  • Follow this model to label jpg/png submissions:
    LastNameFirstName _01_Medium.jpg

LastNameFirstName_02_Medium.jpg

LastNameFirstName_03_Medium.jpg

Important dates:

  • Submission form opens: 10 January 2022 (link to the FORM)
  • Deadline for entries: 28 February 2022
  • Notification of acceptance (via email): 31 March 2022
  • Online exhibition opens: 10 August 2022 (it will stay open for 7 months)
  • Conference dates: 10-12 August 2022

Awards and Honorable Mentions

First prize: $500; Second prize: $350; and Third prize: $200.
Honorable mentions.