By Ferdinand Protzman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 30, 2000; Page G01

Kim Baranowski, an art student at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose graduate sculpture program is ranked among the nation's five best.

RICHMOND—It is critique day at Virginia Commonwealth University's graduate sculpture program, a demanding, nationally ranked crucible of young artistic talent that one professor here refers to as "boot camp for the Battle of SoHo." Twice each semester, students are required to invite three faculty members into their studios to see and discuss the works in progress.

Critiques, or "crits," are used by many of America's top art schools. But at VCU students are given unusually broad latitude to pursue their artistic visions, and they spend months working independently. That policy puts tremendous weight on the critiques. It has produced a steady stream of acclaimed young artists and made VCU, a nondescript urban university located in this citadel of Southern culture, arguably the hottest graduate sculpture program in the country.

These meetings between students and professors are usually collegial, serious and unflinchingly frank, a mixture of midterm, cabin inspection, brainstorming session and encounter group. Occasionally they turn rough. "Crits can get ugly. But then, after you've bitten somebody's head off, everyone goes out for a beer," says Tara Donovan, a sculptor who received her master's degree from VCU last spring and was recently selected for the Whitney Biennial, one of America's premier contemporary art exhibitions. "The teachers treat you like a professional. The point is to give you feedback on your work, to make you think about what you're doing and why you're doing it."

Facing the Critics

Playing around with art: Master's degree student Peter Tascarella and his plywood replica of a video arcade game.

On this particular day, the grad students, most wearing the standard-issue art school colors of black or gray, arrive at their studios early. Their faces bear the tired-but-wired look born of late work, bad sleep and stress.

A trio of professors files into Peter Tascarella's spacious studio in VCU's new $14 million sculpture building. In the center of the room is an exact plywood replica of a video arcade game console, complete with glowing computer screen and pistol-grip joystick. The teachers gaze at the contraption as if it were an alien spacecraft.

The 29-year-old graduate student begins explaining the project that has consumed him for weeks. "There's a video game called Doom, in which the player runs around and shoots monsters with a shotgun," says Tascarella, a reedy fellow with a neatly trimmed goatee. The visitors look blank. "I got the source code of the game and I'm reprogramming it to substitute my face and body for the monsters so that you run around and shoot me. But that will take another two weeks. You can't actually do it today."

The lack of video action doesn't seem to bother faculty members Elizabeth King, Myron Helfgott and Carlton Newton. But Tascarella, a second-year master's student, is a gifted object-maker, a whiz with wood and metal, and his sudden obsession with cyberspace isn't playing well. King asks if someone who didn't know the game would understand the piece.

Tascarella, who has a bachelor's degree in sculpture from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, doesn't answer directly. His generation grew up with video games, he says, and now there are suggestions that the games have contributed to the rising level of violence in society, such as the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, where the two gunmen were heavily into Doom.

"It's an amazing subculture with millions of players," he says. "I've made systems to make objects and I wanted to explore the system of the computer, which led me to the imagery on the Web. I wanted my work to be more ephemeral and to touch on identity and gender issues in the computer. With the shape-shifting you can do with computer imagery and the assumed identities of the Web, you can be anyone."

King suggests that "Doom" is a crisis for Tascarella given his "interest in the hand." Helfgott is less diplomatic. "It seems like you're a little schizophrenic here, Peter."

"Yeah," Tascarella says, slowly shaking his head. "I'm getting more so. But I'm trying to find a balance. I'm really interested in the possibilities of the Internet, but I'm an object-maker."

After a discussion of ways to resolve that conflict by combining computer visuals, sculptural objects and installation, Tascarella seems relieved and pleased. "They gave me a lot of things to think about, which is what I wanted." Asked about the "schizophrenic" remark, he laughs. "Myron's been saying that since I came here."

Process and Craft

Tascarella's critique exemplifies the qualities that prompted U.S. News & World Report to rank VCU's graduate sculpture program as fifth in the nation in 1997, its most recent ranking, behind Yale, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Those art schools tend to stress art about sociopolitical issues such as gender and identity. French philosophy and gender issues are certainly present at VCU, but the emphasis is clearly on process, on conceiving and producing first-rate art. Grad students are given broad latitude to develop and pursue their own work. As a result, someone like Tascarella, who came to VCU making huge wooden globes with intricately carved surfaces that he inks and then rolls over paper to create a print, can become a computer geek without putting his career in jeopardy.

"We're a thinking-working-doing kind of place," says King, a VCU professor and internationally known sculptor and author who shows at the Kent Gallery in New York. "Everyone here likes making stuff and making it as technically sophisticated as possible. I think we care more about process and craft than a lot of schools."

That approach reflects a commitment by the faculty and the university that began back in the 1970s, when sculptor Charles Renick headed the department. Renick established high standards and an informal, open atmosphere that persist to this day. He also hired many of the current faculty members and was a relentless advocate for the department with the university administration. As the department grew and its graduates went on to national acclaim as artists and teachers, the university's commitment expanded. On the undergraduate level, VCU's sculpture department is the largest in the country, with 105 majors. There are 12 students in the master's program.

"From the president on down, the university really understands that VCU's reputation outside of Virginia comes from the School of the Arts and the medical school," says Richard Toscan, dean of the School of the Arts. "There's a very substantial commitment in terms of resources, as you can see with the new building. And the graduate program is just on a roll. In recent years it has probably turned out more interesting sculptors than UCLA, with all its big-name professors."

The School of the Arts has also found innovative ways to fund its programs, such as operating a design school in the emirate of Qatar. That enterprise, set up two years ago, generates about $500,000 a year in fees. Some of that money is used for scholarships and one-off projects such as "Fresh Meat," a recent exhibition at Manhattan's Kim Foster Gallery of works by recent master's graduates from VCU's sculpture program.

VCU's new sculpture building is another source of pride. The state-of-the-art facility houses classrooms, studios, computer labs and even a bronze foundry.

Redefining Sculpture

Among VCU's graduates is Tara Donovan, whose installation "Ripple" was shown in 1998 at the Corcoran.

Though Renick laid the groundwork, the graduate program's fame really began to spread in the late 1980s after the faculty decided to try to adapt to the rapidly changing times in the art world and raise the department's national profile.

"In the mid-1980s, the faculty all sat down to look at where sculpture was going and where we were going," says Joe Seipel, who has been the sculpture department's chairman since 1985, always on a one-year appointment. "What we saw was that sculpture as a field was really exploding. Sculpture was coming to mean anything that wasn't painting. New technologies were emerging, such as video, computers and the Internet. These things required technical skills we didn't have. At the same time all kinds of philosophical, political, social and moral issues were coming into play. You could make art about anything."

To address the technical issues, Seipel and his colleagues set up a system of adjunct instruction using outside experts. For example, a student interested in acquiring advanced welding techniques would be paired with a professional welder until the skills were mastered. The idea is to give students the skills they need as quickly as possible so that they can be applied to making art.

The department, which has seven full-time professors and 10 part-time instructors, also put renewed emphasis on the critique. "We're all professional sculptors, we all have studios and show our works in galleries around the country," Seipel says. "And we treat our grad students as fellow professionals. The critique isn't us passing judgment on them as much as it's a forum for discussing aesthetic issues and the historical context of their work that goes beyond process and technique. We ask them to look at what they're doing and why. And I think they make more interesting art as a result."

The track record of VCU's graduates in recent years supports that view. During the 1990s, VCU grads won a slew of national awards including National Endowment for the Arts individual artist grants, Fulbright fellowships, Joan Mitchell fellowships and International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student awards. Many have gone on to show at major galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami.

Teresita Fernandez, an installation artist who graduated in 1995 and moved to New York, has won an NEA individual grant and shows with Deitch Projects in Manhattan. Last year, Fernandez, 31, had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that got a glowing front-page review in the New York Times' arts section.

Many VCU grads, such as Tony Copes, Marisa Telleria Diaz, Renee Rendine, Kellie Murphy and Tara Donovan, had gallery shows outside Richmond while still in school. Rendine and Donovan both showed at Hemphill Fine Arts in Georgetown before they graduated. Using water-soluble fabric, Rendine sewed series of concentric cylinders that were suspended from the gallery ceiling. At the opening of the exhibit, she wore a bodysuit and slipped inside the cylinders and carefully rubbed holes in the fabric, creating gossamer honeycombs that had a womblike quality.

Donovan, who creates lyrical, tactile and beautiful installations based on the innate physical properties of common materials such as fiber optic cable or toothpicks, filled the Hemphill Gallery with roofing felt, turning it into a topographical survey of some black planet reeking of tar. In both instances, the artists were assisted by their fellow students.

"When they were installing Tara's piece in the gallery, a group of VCU grad students came up to help her," recalls gallery owner George Hemphill. "That sense of camaraderie was impressive. There were some difficult technical issues that Tara had to solve. Her colleagues solved some of them. That's a really giving thing. Part of what makes that school attractive is that the students can come with their own personality and develop pretty much as they choose. They don't have to fit into the Ivy League mind-set, like at Yale. And Richmond is less intimidating than someplace like New Haven or Los Angeles."