Visual art news,
views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
Home Index Calendar Member art Join Resources Feedback Contact us Reviews Submissions Search
Submission Guidelines
How to Send Us Stuff
Visual art news,
views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA
Home Index Calendar Member art Join Resources Feedback Contact us Reviews Submissions Search
Submission Guidelines
How to Send Us Stuff
HOW TO SEND US : Email Calendar Info Text Images Stories Calendar Information Attachments E-vites (don't) Personal Invitations Image Identification Format
Call For Entries or Art Opportunities (competitive shows, jobs, etc.) Snail-Mailed Text Postcard Invitations Gallery Info Schools or Classes Web Addresses (URLs) Slides Digital Images Non-Digital Prints Burn Your Own CDs or DVDs
PROCEDURES : Submission Rules That Apply to Everybody Calendar Procedures
Feedback Proceedures Jobs at DARts (ha!) How to paste text into email
Simple Submission Rules
that apply to everyoneNow that my software is finally 21st Century-compliant, emailed information is used much more quickly than snail mail posted info — especially if there's more than six or seven artists listed. Nice thing about postcards, I can scan the picture.
The info we really need and the order it will be put in is:
Show Title with All Artists' Names at art space time, Month & date of reception, through month and date
No matter how you submit your information, that's the form it will be published in.
The closer your data is to this order, the quicker it will get into the DallasArtsRevue calendar.
Please do not submit information in colors — any colors. Plain text is better than HTML.
Don't abbreviate anything. We spell everything out.
Send your show publicity in a timely manner. If the show's tomorrow, it's too late.
If it is a one-day only event, state so clearly.
Do Not Attach Word documents.
More submissions are rejected because they do not include a list of artists or the closing date than any other reasons.
This is DallasArtsRevue.
Unless a Dallas artist is showing or doing somethng else interesting there, I am much less interested in art outside of Dallas. This includes Lewisville, Irving, Arlington, New York City, Ho Chi Minh City and other locations.
I still list Fort Worth and Denton and some other sub burgs, but I rarely go there to look at art, and I can easily forsee a time when I will ignore those places. I don't want DallasArtsRevue to expand. I want it to contract.
DO NOT label categories, like
title:
artists:
location:It's a nuisance, and I just have to edit all those words out.
Do NOT label artists, like
Ferdinand Tantos, painter – refugee artist from Thailand, now lives in Dallas, TX
I just have to edit that out.
Just list the artists' names in paragraph form separated by commas
Jim Smith, Tom McGillicutty, John Mix, Dale Patrick, Mary Ann Who, John T and Mary C Compton, Emily Bryan, Harold Clare, Johnny Weissmueller, Lash Larue, Missy Milktoast and Horace Fullerbrighter
Adding info I don't need and won't use just means more work to edit it out.
I procrastinate work. Easy goes fast.
State it in sentence form. Then stop. I don't need hype. Probably nobody does. It is very unlikely anyone anywhere will ever use your hype.
1. Show title(s)
DARts edits or ignores titles like “Recent Work.” If your show's title is interesting, we'll use it. Show titles are bolded, so it grabs attention.
2. Artist(s)' name(s)
DARts will not list events without names of all Dallas artists in the show. (Yes, all. We've listed as many as 200 names before and will again — as long as I don't have to type them. We have plenty of space.)
List all artists' names in paragraph form with a comma (,) then a space after each name. Please type them in Title Case, not ALL CAPs or all lower case, please.
3. Location
gallery, room, building, etc. name, address, city, state, country — if not Dallas. There's a page for maps, so if your art space is difficult to find, send us a map.
DARts won't list addresses in a tour, but we'll link the tour web site in the calendar. For tours, we'll choose among better-known locations where people can pick up maps prior to the event. We still want the names of all the artists on the tour. No artist names, no listing.
The first time we list your art space, we'll cite the address. After that, make sure it's on the Arts Space Information Page.
Precise number addresses for galleries, lectures, etc. are helpful for those who use online mapping services.
Cross streets are often helpful.
2038 South Chautauqua at Altus Boulevard
Many people use Mapscos, so those numbers can be helpful.
Mapsco 37H
Remember that MapQuest and other online mapping utilities get it wrong sometimes. Check it out before you depend on those squirrels.
4. Gallery or exhibition space
5. Opening times and date
The correct format for expressing time/date in DallasArtsRevue is
7-9 Friday September 23. (We use pink type to indicate time.)
If you state the day of the week, we'll use it, and readers will be able to remember the day for your event better, but we won't add it for you.
We generally assume AM and PM are obvious. When they aren't, we might use them in lower case.
11 pm - 3 am
We differenciate 12 am and 12 pm by calling them midnight and noon.
DallasArtsRevue Calendar Events are arranged by closing dates.
Without the closing date, we cannot list your show.
DARts' email address is always on the Contact Us page.
Information pasted from Microsnot Word documents look funny in email. Curly quotes turn into question marks or asterisks (*) and dashes look goofy.
Please use or paste plain text in emails.
Save your document as .txt or .rtf, then paste it into an email.
Keep it short.
Put all information in the body of an email.
if you don't know how to do that, read How to paste text into emails. It's simple.
Do not attach MicroSnot Word documents.
Do not send images of words, because I can't cut and paste text from them. I hate retyping, and I'm not very good at it.
"Informative" JPEGs are not helpful. If I can't copy and paste text information, your event might get left out.
Spell out all words — including months, Streets, Boulevards and everything else. Don't use " for inches, ever.
Use intelligent email subjects.
Give meaningful names to image files.
Do not email images AND send postcards. It's confusing.
If I see two or more emails from you, I'll assume they are spam and throw them all away.
If you ignore these instructions, I will ignore you.
Do not send me reminders. They confuse me.
Do not type in all capital letters. I just have to retype it, and I procrastinate doing that.
Do not send elaborate Press Releases. All I need is the facts. More than that is hype.
Do not send PDFs. Put all the info I need in the text of one email. Then stop.
Hype is hype, and after the important info noted above, I don't need it.
If you need to communicate with me, email me and explain your issue.
Please do not double or triple or quadruple-space calendar notices.
It makes it harder and takes longer for me
to put all the right information together.
When you make it harder for me to do my job,
I take longer to post your notices.
The DallasArtsRevue calendar is free.
If the editor gets snippy, you're probably ignoring my guidelines.
Make it easy, and I'll run your listing quickly and efficiently.
Only especially talented writers' prose ever makes it to the DARts Calendar.
Include all the info in the text of one email.
Personal Invitations
If what you are sending me is actually a personal invitation, please state that clearly, and I will not pester you for calendar information.
Do not use generic email subjects
“Art” or “Art News” is nothing new here.
“Press Release” is not specific enough.
If you can't think of anything else, use the artist & gallery name.
I.e., “J R Compton at The White Rock Lake Museum in the Bath House Culture Center January through mid-April 2008” makes sense and lets me know immediately what your email is about. And yes, I actually will have a show there then.
Get to the point quickly.
The farther down an email or printed page I have to go to find information, the less likely I will.
If I have to click several pages down to find mention of your event, I won't.
If you are promoting several kinds of events — only some of which are visual art events, send me a separate email.
Who, what, when, why and where are usually sufficient.
I ignore purple prose, especially words like “world renowned” (If an artist really is, you won't have to say it. Almost always, if you say those words, the artist isn't.)
Describe work in a show simply, preferably by media, but I'll probably ignore it.
Photographs by Ernie & Bert. Sculpture by Art Shirer. Performance Art by Annie Boddy. Don't give me their life histories.
I won't include your champagne tasting, special vodka drinkathon or any other alcoholic reception accoutrements.
Information about the food, drinks or music at your opening will not be published.
Information about the art, artists, art lovers or art professionals or others who speak, lecture or show slides or their work will be published.
Be Timely: Send show information 2 weeks before the event.
If you wait till the last minute to send me information, I might well not get around to adding your information until after your opening reception.
Don't send me a list of future events.
I'll just use the most current one and trash the rest. I am not well organized enough to keep track of your future events. Send them 2 to 5 weeks to ahead of time, please.
Give meaningful names to images
Image 001
This lovely image came to me as Image 001 — no indication of who the artist was, what gallery or whatever it came from or why.
Just image 001, like it was their first digital image. I might have used it, if I knew what it was or where it came from. It's pretty. It shows well at low resolution. It's bold and graphic with lots of fine details.
I get dozens of these every month.
Name images by artist and gallery name.
The format for identification of images
is as follows and never varies, except when I can't get all the information:
Richard Ray - Cycling at White Rock Lake, 2007
oil on canvas - 24 x 30 inchesCaptions are ALWAYS typed in this sequence:
Artist Name - Title, year date
media - size in inches (always expressed as height x width x depth) inches (as below).No inch (") marks, ever!
If you are a DallasArtsRevue member, I will link your name to your member page almost every time I see it.
If you are not a member, you should join.
Gallery Information
New (to us) galleries or art spaces should send additional information, to be included on our Art Space Information (for galleries) or Museums & Art Centers pages.
- Art space name
- address, including street address and zip code,
- phone number for information
- web site address (URL) and email address(es)
- open days and times
- contact person
If you send an image attached to an email, chances are better I'll use it, but I don't use many. I am picky. I go for pretty, unusual, work by students, stuff I like.
Do not attach images to email then send a postcard with the same information.
Just send the email.
Do not ask for a review.
I review work that thrills or chills me or makes me want to write about it.
I don't write reviews on requests or command.The Gallery/Art Space Information Page is not at the top of my list, and galleries are not added in a timely manner. I usually add new ones when I get calendar information, and I think my readers will want to know more about that gallery.
Calendar Procedures are below.
DARts seeks news about Dallas artists, out of town and out of state. But keep it simple. All we need is who, what, when and where. Purple prose is ignored, and check out the rules for all other submissions, before you send stuff.
DallasArtsRevue's Postal Address
Send invitations, flyers, PR (I often scan printed images for illustrations on the calendar page), postcard invitations, brochures or publicity notices to:
DARts
914 Grandview Av
Dallas TX 75223Make checks payable to J R Compton, not anything else
Do not send slides.
Do not send me E-vites!
If you are inviting me personally, send me an email. Make it clear you are inviting me personally and not wanting to get listed on the calendar.
Feedback
If you send feedback, be sure to notify me if you do not want it published.
I assume everything is for sharing.
If you sign your name, I'll probably use it.
If you sign it “anonymous,” so will I.
DARts loves feedback — positive or negative, good, bad or ugly, and we especially like to print the negative ones, although we don't publish everything.
Your opinion is more important than who sent it.
See the DARts Feedback page for examples.
If you send negative feedback, don't get mad at me for publishiing your letter word for word.
The privacy of emails is not protected by law like U.S. Mail is. Many people can read your "private" emails.
If you're pleasant, I'll correct your grammar and spelling errors.
Artists' Opportunities & Calls For Entries
Full infomation about submitting those are on the Artists Opportunities page.
Schools and public and private classes
DARts Schools & Classes page lists public and private schools and teachers. It's a resource list, not udated often enough to list specific classes and dates. But we will list schools and all kinds of contact data.
And we're happy to list private teachers, including the types of classes they teach.
We recommend everyone include geographic addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and a web site (that way, you can update specific class lists, and we don't have to).
Check out the page and see how others are listed, and check out the rules for all other submissions, before you send stuff.
Images
(I know I've railed against attachments for years. Now that I can finally quickly and easily download them, I appreciate them and might even use yours.)
Do not send images inside a word processing document.
Do not send words inside an image document, like a JPEG.
Name them with your first and last or gallery name or better yet, your show's title.
Name them with your name or don't send them.
Snail Mail
The best way to send us pictures is to mail picture postcards or other printed matter via the U.S. Mail to the address above.
You can also send color prints or snapshots in a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE), so I can post them back to you after I digitize them.
No SASE, no return.
Probably no return, no matter what, unless you are very very lucky or I've just cleaned my office, an annual proposition.
Postcards, Brochures, Etc.
Images printed with ink on paper from a printing press (postcards, brochures or magazines) are great. I deal with them every day.
Images printed on your cheap computer printer are probably not good enough.
Send me a copy of your original image file, instead.
Either black & white or color is okay, but color is more fun, more descriptive and just as cheap on the internet.
I'm much more likely to use color images.
Slides
Do not send slides. They're expensive, and I don't deal well with them.
Burning Your Own CDs or DVDs
If you can burn your own, the best format for sending images is digitalized as JPEGs or PSD (Photoshop Documents) on a CD-ROM or DVD.
If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it.
Burn your images as files from 2 to 20 megabytes in size.
Put slides or CDs of digital images in a stamped, self-addressed envelope — if you want them back.
Label your CD by writing on it with a felt tip marker.
Name your CD or DVD file before you burn it, so when it shows up on my computer desktop, I can see what it is.
I already have lots of unlabeled CDs floating around. Without a label, yours will get lost.
Digital Images
File size should be at least 400k.
Smaller than that won't give me the quality I need.Make the name meaningful — use your name and/or the title of the piece or the show or whatever you're promoting.
Tell me who sent it or name it after the event itself.
Non-digital Prints
If you are not set up for digital photography, you should be.
If you know what you're doing
and you want to digitally scan a slide:
Full image 35mm slides should be scanned at 800 pixels per inch
Use JPEG format for continuous tone images or photographs
PSD (uncompressed Photoshop document) format is appreciated when files are burned on CDs or DVDs.
Do not ever send PSD attachments.
See Burning Your Own CDs or DVDs above.
Avoid using GIF format for tonal images.
TIF(F)s are a nuissance, but I can use them.
BMPs are useless.
Don't send GIFs or JPEGs of text.
Send text in the text of an email, not as attachments.
I read every email I get except obvious spam.
URLs
Artists With Web Pages and other DARts pages list and link websites.
Your site or page may be listed on Artists with Web Pages by sending us your name, city address and URL.
Submit URLs (web addresses) in the
http://www.your-address.com format
Tell me what city you live in.
If your site or page does not load or major portions of it do not load or load painfully slowly, or
There's no images of your work on the top level, I'll either complain, won't list it, or browse till I find where your art actually is, then use that URL instead.
I may label your link:
pSdLt = painfully slow downloading time
HtR = Hard to Read
I don't mind recharacterizing your site if you fix it (but don't make demands).
If your link on DallasArtsRevue needs updating, tell me on what page your link is.
Don't just say your link is on my site. I have several sites.
Tell me exactly where your URL is listed on which DARts page. I don't memorize every link, and there's more than 1,000 pages on this site.
DARts Calendar Procedures
I usually post the info first, then add the pictures when and if that's convenient.
Sending me everything via email, then snail mailing the same info confuses me. Just send the email. Now that I finally have high-speed Internet (beep-beep), I often use images attached to email. That is the best way to send them to me.
If you send two or more emails with essentially the same content, I'll assume you are spamming and trash them all.
Handing me an invitation or flyer at an opening or a party is a particularly inefective way of getting your event listed. I lose or forget those things almost immediately.
Email (best) or mail notices to the above addresses, please.
When DARts errs, tell me. I love to get — and publish — intelligent feedback. And I'd prefer to present accurate information. But tell me the exact URL of the page with the error. With more than 1,000 web pages here, it is impossible to remember every mention.
We don't mind if you use a pen name or submit stuff anonymously, as long as you sign your message, so I know who wrote it.
We encourage pseudonyms for shy people and those who do not have the intentional fortitude to stand up with their own opinioons.
If you send us an angry letter, then get shy and want it retracted, it won't happen.
The old new notices on the calendar are deleted every week. Red quote marks (") indicate text taken from the source, artist, gallery, press release, etc. It's stuff we did not originate, though we may have appropriated it.
Indented or other text in gray usually expresses the opinions of Editor/Publisher J R Compton.
I won't type the word gallery on the Calendar page, so assume it's there. If your gallery name is long and involved, it will be edited.
I try to keep the download time for the DARts Calendar down.
If you can't find someone or some thing using the Site Map or Search This Site utility, it probably isn't here.
My personal prejudice is toward 3-D art and anything from Dallas over everything else from anywhere other. But I have a lot of paintings, and I think I'm beginning to understand that medium — some. I've been a photographer since 1964, so I can pretty easily get my mind around those.
Other DARts writers have significantly different prejudices, which is why I keep them around.
How to send text in the body of an email
Create a new email to
Our latest email address is always on the Contact Us page.
Highlight
In your word processing program, select the text — words, paragraphs — by swiping through the text with the cursor, so the words turn black or some color.Copy
control c [PC] or command c [Mac] (c is for copy) the text.Don't worry about where it goes (It goes into a temporary storage area. Mac calls it the clipboard. I don't know what PC calls it.)
But don't copy anything else on top of it.
Click into your email to DARts.
Paste control v [PC] or command v [Mac] (Think of the v as a funnel.) into the email.
Send email to
Do Not Attach Word Processing Documents to email.
Include all the text I need to see in the text of the email.
Writing for DallasArtsRevue
THIS IS ART; THIS IS NOT ART by Gerald Burns
I do not give assignments. I let writers decide what they want to write about. I usually do not find out what that is until they submit their stories, although they sometimes tell me.
DallasArtsRevue does accept unsolicited manuscripts. If they're good, we even publish them.
There are no deadlines. If you're writing about a show, it's nice if our readers have time to check out the art for themselves, but that's not always possible.
My best advice to anyone who wants to start writing for DallasArtsRevue is to find a single piece of art by a local artist that the writer likes or is inspired by, then write about it.
Describe it, so we can 'see' it even without the inevitable photograph. Tell us what's interesting about it, not why it's bad, although drawbacks can be explored. Let your descriptions speak your opinions, instead of just saying this or that is bad or good. The drawing above is a joke.
I want DARts to be positive and educational, not full of diatribe. And I prefer writers who can express themselves clearly and directly. I want to enjoy reading stories. I want writers to have opinions, but I want those opinions to be backed up by what they say.
If you don't know what you're talking about, I'll know.
Dallas is the first word in DallasArtsRevue. Unless an outside artist is showing here in something peculiarly Dallas, I'm not interested. I'll still probably not be very interested.
Dallas Dallas Dallas.
DallasArtsRevue is about Dallas art and artists and institutions.
If you are angry about something, do something that calms you down, figure out why you're angry, then write me something later.
Don't write about ART, write about art. Just because I published something of yours, does not mean I will automatically publish something else. I've even kept back stories by Michael Helsem, who is still the best art writer I know.
Caveats
Do not write about your friends or somebody in your family.
Keep your writing real. If you don't know what you are talking about, don't talk about it.
Michael Helsem can get away with using words I don't know what mean. You probably can't.
Do not send me your photographs of art you review. I prefer to take my own or get them from the gallery.
First-time DARts writers should email me to tell me what they plan to write about before they write about it.
since November 5, 2005
