The selectors said: Locker 50B at the VCU School of the Arts has lights that come on when the viewer looks in at miniature art by artists of local, national and international acclaim. Her next curatorial adventure was almost gargantuan, with “Fluff My Pillow” organized with visiting professor Mark Harris using the rooms of the Inns of Virginia on Broad Street as galleries for one-person and group shows. Her life is as much a part of her art as the pieces she makes.

Virginia Samsel’s 2004 student exhibition was titled “Sometimes Bad Things Happen For No Reason.” Boy, do they ever. The Broad Street fire that consumed a building under construction also damaged the School of the Arts, destroying 200 pieces of Samsel’s work, including all but three works she’d made for the show.

She now can laugh about the portent of her show’s title. “Maybe I should’ve titled it, ‘Sometimes a Million Dollars Falls in Your Lap For No Reason.’ ”

For three days before the opening, she urgently made new works on paper while seated on a picnic blanket in the gallery. She designated three walls as Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and by the Thursday opening, “I was exhausted and a little delusional, but it turned out well.”

These were her characteristic small works bearing her grim themes: volcanoes, blood and little animals attacking one another or, on occasion, her.

She grew up near the Pony Pasture Rapids with parents who have graphic-design backgrounds; her mother created exhibits for the Science Museum of Virginia, and her father made maps for the U.S. Geological Survey. Samsel’s first artwork was a drawing — a bad one, she laughs — of a cow; this matured into small pieces painted, drawn, even crocheted, many having animals as their subject.

The Locker 50B gallery on the third floor of VCU’s Fine Arts Building opened in 2002 while Samsel was an undergraduate in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Samsel was able to put almost her entire semester’s output in this one locker. “People said it was a like a gallery in there,” she says. And so her big idea was to go small. She purchased wood flooring and walls from a dollhouse shop and added track lighting that turns on when visitors approach.

The gallery remained open after Samsel’s 2004 graduation, and she served as its paid part-time curator for a while. In 2004, she helped coordinate the “Fluff My Pillow” shows that for a brief time turned a hotel into a series of art galleries. This started with three rooms; by 2006 it had grown to 28 rooms and the involvement of seven other schools.

Samsel continues making her distinctive miniatures, and some of her work is in “de.pic.tion.” a show traveling from Chicago to Knoxville, Tenn.

11th Annual Theresa Pollak Prize Recipients:

Lifetime Achievement  Photography  Words  Arts Innovator  Vocalist  Ensemble  Fine Arts  Dance  Theater  Film  Emerging Artist  Applied Arts