It was the inspiration of Kim Poor at a 1983 Death Valley workshop, hosted by Michael Carroll and attended by 21 artists from two countries, including Andy Chaikin, Don Davis, Don Dixon, Marilynn Flynn, Joel Hagen, Bill Hartmann, Pam Lee, Jon Lomberg, Ron Miller, Paul Hudson, and Rick Sternbach, that set the wheels in motion to create the International Association of Astronomical Artists. As a result, word of the new genre of space art began to spread. Poor and others pointed out that the movement has, as its roots, the art of James Nasmyth, Lucien Ruduax, Chesley Bonestell, Ludek Pesek, Thomas Moran, and Robert McCall.
At the end of 1984, Kim Poor organized a smaller workshop in the southwest American Canyonlands. The focus was to establish a continuance of the previous workshop themes of joint intellectual and emotional exploration of the solar system’s geological analogs. The third official IAAA workshop returned to Big Island in Hawaii in the spring of 1986. Coupled with an exhibition at the Volcano Art Center, the workshop’s primary concern was to paint terrestrial surfaces of the Moon, Mars, and Venus as well as the ice worlds of the gaseous giants during the Comet Halley flyby. During this session, the proposal to conduct workshops at several sites, including Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1987 and Iceland in 1988.
With the successes of the previous workshops and a rapidly growing membership, the IAAA was formally registered as an association in 1986. The steering committee moved to elect its first president - Kim Poor. Pulsar was launched as a means to keep the membership informed about what was happening at the organizational level. Parallax, the first newsletter, was to be reserved for the publication of technical knowledge essential for the guild to render space art landscapes. NASA received the IAAA at Johnson Space Center for the fourth workshop in the summer of 1987, with the theme of space hardware. The participants were treated to exclusive tours of the facility, including a space station mockup and shuttle orbiter simulator, by none other than astronaut Alan Bean, and were allowed to try on actual space suits and space station equipment.
In the Autumn of 1987, seven space artists, Michael Carroll, Don Davis, Pamela Lee, Jon Lomberg, Robert McCall, Ron Miller, and Kim Poor were invited to attend the Space Future Forum in Moscow at the USSR Academy of Sciences along with a contingent of astronauts and scientists. The artists brought some of their artwork to participate in a joint exhibition with their Soviet counterparts in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Sputnik. During their stay, the Planetary Society initiated the concept of an artistic collaboration between American and Soviet astronomical artists by inviting the Cosmic Group of the Soviet Union of Artists to attend an IAAA workshop in Iceland the following summer. A joint venture in the exciting landscape of fire and ice certainly appealed to all astronomical artists rendering the planets and the moons of the solar system.
In 1988, the end of July, Kara Szathmary, who had also attended the IAAA workshop in Iceland, was nominated by Kim Poor and elected the first International President with the mandate to incorporate the IAAA as a NonProfit, Public, Broadly-Based, Educational Art Foundation, along with the newly created Board of Trustees. Kim further pursued his passion for the involvement with NovaGraphics, securing the personal signatures of astronauts, as well as forming a collection of space art examples for inclusion in his gallery, NovaSpace, to promote astronomical art as a genre for the world to appreciate. He recruited Alan Bean, Michael Carroll, Don Davis, Don Dixon, Bob Eggleton, Marilynn Flynn, David A Hardy, Bill Hartmann, Pam Lee, Robert McCall, Ron Miller, and others to assist in his project, which grew and developed as time passed.
In the following decade, Kim invited David A Hardy to come to visit him from England, as the first non-US member to be a guest in his home. While there, Dave personally signed 500 NovaSpace Gallery prints of Proxima Planet, and Kim invited him for a visit up to Kitt Peak Observatory.
In 2007, the Spacefest Convention had its inaugural launch because of Kim Poor’s creative ideas. Kim attended the event as the IAAA founder and first president, along with Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, and other astronauts from every US space flight era. Now, Kim has taken his place as a Fallen Star among the giants of space exploration and astronomical art that have inspired people from all over the world in 23 countries.
