In a centrally located area in the city of Richmond, the youth hostel that I propose provides young people and backpackers a suitable place to stay while enjoying their journey in the historical city of Richmond. The youth hostel offers inexpensive overnight lodging and other amenities they can use for themselves such as self-serve kitchens, laundtry rooms, etc. Something that is worth mentioning, the youth hostel's site is also close by the Richmond Visitor Center. It can offer travelers some travel information or souvenir venue. Furthermore, with the distinguished site, there is another characteristic. That is, the building was built in 1963 and it represents the International Building Style. The Jackson Ward community primariry consists of tra-ditional architecture style buildings, such as Italianate and Second Empire styles. The building for this project is the only modern structure. This makes it stand out and give the impression of an emotionless institution. Therefore, there is no doubt that the International Style building holds a place in this community. So, how can the community embrace this site? How do the characteristics of Jackson Ward integrate with my building? And how can the archi-tectural style of this building relate better and warm up to the residents? By transforming the residential design elements in Jackson Ward Area, my endeavor is not only to create a welcoming youth hostel inside the building but also to introduce Richmond's history and famous spots to travelers. While more people visit the youth hostel, more people will know about Jackson Ward, and the city of Richmond.

By integrating the gallery model within the museum model, a new hybrid model is allowed to take form which works to establish the legacy of heritage of a place and provides the muse for artists working today. Through the application of 3rd Space theory to this new hybrid model, the place in question can become integral to the activities of the people of the community and its visitors, providing sustainable support and community involvement to the non-profit model. The Old City Market is an icon to historic Petersburg. As a museum, the building will serve the community as a place where the heritage of art and craft within the community is redefined. As a gallery, the building will serve the community as a place where artists can sell their work, supporting the act of making. By supporting the co-existence of these spaces as a hybrid, the arts become a micro-economy where artists seek both inspiration and sustenance. Museums are increasingly threatened by greater economic variables. They are considered to be non-essential by many and financial support is relegated to uncertain philanthropic giving. By positioning museums as gathering places for the community’s daily rituals, people are more likely to see them as an important institution to maintain, and worthy of their financial support. The museum will become a 3rd Space, which, as defined by author Ray Oldenburg, is a place outside of home or work where community members go to interact. A successful 3rd Space is an accessible one, in terms of cultural un-bias, physical accommodation, openness and recognition (Oldenburg 1997). By making the Old City Market such a place, its likelihood of survival increases infinitely. The success of this strategy is dependent on the interior environment’s engagement with the exterior environment.

The purpose of this thesis is to explain my process in the development of the costume design for Urinetown: The Musical as my last mainstage design project for the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Theatre. Included is the concept, analysis and design process that went into creating effective costumes for the production for the stage.

Over the last two years(August 2006-June 2008) I have been engaged in landscape painting that takes an experimental approach to material. My use of acrylic, the plastic paint, combines landscape with distortion and artificiality. Plastic has lost the futuristic and hopeful appeal it had in the past but it might still be an apt material to employ for a truly American artwork.

Shape, color and line are three basic elements I use to explore the possibilities of visual language. The process in itself is important since what is left on the paper are simply records of moments from which a work is constructed. These moments are mixtures of my memory, my everyday observation, my struggles and hopes. The starting point is always in between known and unknown, and it is always a new attempt for clarity. Rather than expressing what I already understand and know, I have a need to change my working methods quite often in order to expand my own limits. Since I moved from Serbia into the United States in 1997, landscape has been evident in my work. However, my thinking about landscape has gradually changed. I understand now that this transformation parallels both my physical and emotional transition from my homeland to America. A sense of displacement has been present through all the processes, but its meaning and how it is reflected in my work has changed. From describing the actual, physical displacement from my homeland in the earlier works, the sense of displacement now comes from the abstracted formal elements of the work itself.

I have always approached my paintings with confidence. Mark making has always been my strength, particularly in drawing, and I feel this comes through in my gestural use of the paint. I also believe I approach paintings in a trial and error manner, where experimentation has precedence over concept. To remain in the moment and focused on what I am doing at that moment is a fundamental base of both my process and, interestingly what the resulting image translates to the viewer. To know this, and to remain suspended in this moment requires a foundation of trust within my capabilities and myself. Approaching each new surface, I test various methods of applying paint. The successful methods prove to be ones that allow me to continuously build the surface into a coherent image. These methods I choose from, sometimes in sequences, as obstructions, or as starting points. In each painting, I begin differently, even if it is just a different colored ground. I have found the most success in starting with a specific method, one that exists in isolation, as a starting point. I believe that too often, I look for answers outside myself instead of looking within. I do not seek a linear trajectory for painting, and my own work, though ironically specific to its medium, should not be categorized into a neat package. If my brush is an extension of myself, then what I think and feel comes through as my own thoughts and feelings.

Finding and extracting meaning from the world I encounter every day is the primary motivation behind my creativity. Filtering perception and separating the important bits of information by selection or elimination is the crux of this investigation. This process is one of finding rationale in futility and applying meaning to meaningless encounters. The significance of life is not fixed and it is our responsibility to make it up to best suit the desire to have purpose. Depending on the way something is looked at determines the meaning behind it. Anything can have content if it is seen and translated a certain way. Aligning this inquiry to the course of painting is how I examine the pieces of information that have potential importance. Painting allows me to slow down, scrutinize, and evaluate the way I perceive reality. Every image seems unrelated but is actually connected by an undercurrent of doubt at every level of creation.

My work seeks to simulate the impermanence of memory, through the creation of structures and images that translate the mind’s formless but living past into physical material and sensation. The need to search for the missing six years of my childhood memories in Thailand has been the driving force behind the works, along with the lingering emotions of emptiness and unfulfillment. I create multimedia installations with materials, such as plaster, pvc panels, acrylic, polycrylic and dura-lar, to structurally realize a subject as intangible and elusive as memory. Issues of duality, identity, impermanence and memory are underlying themes for my thesis investigation. Dreamfall is a simulated, dream-like landscape where the pervading sense of solitude exists throughout the sparsity and whiteness of the installation. It is a place for contemplation and silence, a landscape of the past relived.

Abstract: My vanilla, Grade A, white bread, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road, threadbare, well-worn, moth-eaten, potato sack, butterscotch, grass stained America: Mundane American life is an existence clinging to the ordinary, where a quilt of mass- mediated preferences and ingrained traditions define many people, specifically from north to south and east to west. Yet, the tastes and dialects of people within the mundane are complex. Ideological preferences are rooted in immigrant history and political persuasion. Various modes of realism have been used by American painters such as The Ash Can School, Regionalists of the 1930’s, and Pop Art. The notion of the real and mundane have an integral link to each other in art, as often the real may reveal a truth about the world, that which may be ugly or sordid. Depictions of everyday objects and common people break down the great divide between high art and popular culture. Pop Art is postmodern in its "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism." In this paper I will dissect the complexity of the mundane through the use of my own and others’ paintings and photographs. Through reference and description Americana’s well-worn customs and preferences in day-to-day life will be analyzed.

This thesis re-evaluates Italian Futurist art's relationship with the past, focusing on the years 1909-1919. This aspect of the movement is fundamental to its complex identity, yet has not received prolonged scholarly attention. In order to reconsider Futurism's temporality this thesis focuses on the fine art practice and theoretical writings of Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, and also the writings on the movement's leader F.T. Marinetti, plus the Florentine Futurists Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici. The historiography of Futurism, which both produces the reductive antipassatista model of the movement and highlights the presence of formal similarities between the Italian artistic tradition and Futurism, is also interrogated. The first part of this thesis argues that the Futurist temporality is more nuanced than the widely accepted model of adoration of the future and repudiation of the past, and that it is related to the conflicting notions of time present in the decade in question. Using the Futurists' concept of time to analyse their relationships with the past, present and future, it argues that the present is the most important temporal mode for Futurism, but that the past and future are part of this present. This thesis approaches Futurism's relationship with Italy's artistic past in tandem with its interrogation of its temporality. This requires a consideration of the temporality of art history, the temporal orientation of avant-gardism and the connotations of tradition and appropriation in art historical practice in order to produce a spiralling art historical model in which returns to the past can be forms of progress. In the second part of this thesis, these possible appropriations of the Italian artistic tradition from Magna Graecia to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo are surveyed, using the reception of earlier art historical periods in early twentieth century Italy to consider how and why the Futurists could have appropriated them. The Futurists' continuation of the recent past of Italian and French art from Italian unification up to the launch of Futurism is also addressed, noting the anti passatismo of these precedents to show that the Futurist relationship with the past, as reconstructed in this thesis, was not sui generis. The aim of this thesis is to bring together Futurism's rhetoric about the past, understanding of time, and relationship with art history in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the movement's antipassatismo.