On an empty coffee cup in the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University is drawn a fantastical creature. Nearby is a map of a city that does not exist.

As it does every spring, the gallery, which is part of the school, is giving itself over to showcasing the work of VCU art students. A series of four exhibitions will be held there and running through mid-May. The first two feature the work of undergraduate students, the last two of second-year graduate students seeking their Master of Fine Arts degrees.

The exhibition that runs through March 29 - the one with the imaginary creature on the coffee cup and the map called “Impossible City” – is devoted to work from the departments of Communication Arts (illustration, drawing and visual studies), Fashion Design and Merchandising, Kinetic Imaging (film, video and animation) and Interior Design.

This exhibition is juried, with members of the relevant departments determining which student artists’ work gets in.

The following exhibition, April 10-19, will also be a juried show, this time of fine arts. David R. McFadden, chief curator and vice president for programs and collections at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, will come in to make the selections.

Richard Toscan, dean of the VCU School of the Arts, said, “We think it’s really good for [the students’] professional preparation to have to submit their work to a juried situation where an outside professional determines what gets in.

“One of the things about the School of the Arts is that we’re joined at the hip to the professions we represent. There’s nothing about the ivory tower in the School of the Arts. We tend to link the students to the profession from practically the first day they get here, so when they leave, there is a smooth transition.”

The last two exhibitions, April 24-May 3 and May 8 to 17, are for second-year graduate students. The work to be shown will be counted as their MFA theses.

One of these grad students, Maria Pithara, shoots videos influenced by classical images of great art. But the materials she uses to suggest these images are anything but high-falutin’.

A native of Cyprus, Pithara has filmed four women of different generations performing small tasks in an apartment or on a set in a studio. Each section is based on a prop or a specific visual image she wished to create.

In one section, called “The Mourners,” the women are dressed in black and wearing collars suggested by paintings in the Renaissance. But while the original collars in the paintings were lacy and exquisitely crafted, Pithara’s are intentionally trashy and cheap.

One is made of a roasting pan, which functions simultaneously as a collar, a bonnet and a kind of halo.

“It’s all very silly, very absurd. A lot of my visual sources are high-culture, but there is a lot of low culture in it, too, when I make it,” she said.

Joining Pithara in the second MFA thesis exhibition will be sculptor Julie Ann Nagle, who works in mixed media.

Nagle, who is from Pittsburgh, will have a room to herself at the exhibit, which she will use to show three sculptures made from everything from carved wood to plastic to kinetic objects, and many media in between.

“The more media or techniques you have control over, the wider the variety of ways you have to express your ideas. But not all artists work that way – some people are specialists in one medium,” she said.

Nagle’s sculptures reflect her interest in history and science, especially in the Age of Enlightenment during the 18th century. Part of one sculpture includes a glass bust of Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, the wife of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was beheaded during the French Revolution. Though little known today, she assisted in his experiments and has been called “the mother of modern chemistry.”

The Age of Enlightenment fascinates Nagle because it was a period marked by great optimism and knowledge, yet it was an era of colonialism and sexism, she said.

“I am particularly interested in science, because we have faith in progress and the promise of technology. The more I study the history of science or the development of different fields and technology, the more I learn how much corruption and fallibility goes into it. We can’t help but be human,” she said.

Nagle is still working on two of the three sculptures for the installation. Although they are separate works, she said, “the pieces will be in conversation with each other when they are together.”

What she is certain of is that when the works are complete, together they will make the room look like “a cross between a science lab, a classroom and a museum, an imaginative museum from an indeterminate time.”

Toscan noted that U.S. News & World Report called the VCU School of the Arts the best public university school of arts and design in the country for 2009, the second time it achieved the top ranking. And this time, he said, it was in the top five for schools public or private, behind Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and tied with the Maryland Institute College of Art.

And the School of the Arts’ top rankings should make the upcoming exhibitions even more popular, he said, especially because most of the art is for sale.

“It’s an incredible range of art from a group of, for the most part, graduating artists –some of whom are bound to show up in the professional art world in the next five to eight years. [Visitors] get a chance to see this work before it has been discovered. I think that is why these shows are so popular – these things are mobbed,” he said. “It’s like going and thinking you’re going to discover a hidden gem.”

WEB | http://www.vcu.edu/arts/gallery