Run by students for students, Gallery One eases the transition to the real art world.

Sitting on the gray marble steps outside the University of the Arts, one might never realize the artistic pulse that beats below. This month sees the opening of a new venue, dedicated to more than just classes: Gallery One, on the ground floor of Hamilton Hall, is the first student-run gallery on UArts campus and part of a growing citywide trend, allowing artists-in-training to curate and mount shows of others’ work. Once an unoccupied student lounge, Gallery One is a refreshing renovation that presents the collective strengths of the students.

The driving force behind Gallery One's launch can be found in five leading ladies: Anita Schillhorn van Veen, Joan Mumbauer, Melanie Greene, Kylie Grant and Carrie Powell, all art students who envisioned the first student-initiated and student-run gallery completely dedicated to promoting their peers' work. Their goal, set in motion last spring, was to create a balance between an intimate confessional space and artistic showcase, which would reveal both the vulnerability of its young artists and also the raw reaction between the art and the spectator. Gallery One is small, but spacious enough so that each piece of artwork radiates outward from the white walls. Its circulating sculptures engulf the eye with tangible color and motion. While there is an artistic aptitude applied in each pupil's work, the same is evident in the founders' intellectual inventiveness, which will ensure the gallery a positive evolutionary process.

The first group exhibit, titled "My First Time," explores the swirling emotions surrounding one's first experience -- in any activity. Playing off the exhibit's witty title, artist Amber Lynn Thompson's is one of the must-sees in the show: 16 different panties, marked with the name of a sexual partner and arranged chronologically by date of the sexual experience, capture the curiosity of any bystander. Yet what leaves the viewer snickering comes from the last pair of underwear which reads, after 15 other encounters, "Born again virgin, 2002."

The exhibit features 30 student artists, whose work ranges from photography, mixed collage and glass sculptures to film, live performances and animation. "The goal is to unify the three schools that make up the University of the Arts," says Greene, a graduate student majoring in art education, about the combination of visual and performing arts and film.

The artwork in the first show was by invitation, but the students and faculty, hoping to promote participation, will jury future shows. Gallery One has the full support of the university administration, including President Miguel Angel Corzo, assistant dean of the College of Art and Design Adrienne Staleck and liaison to the president Jan DeVries, who helped to find the space to house the students' plans. However, the responsibility of organizing, curating and promoting Gallery One lies solely on the shoulders of the students. While similar programs at other schools, such as Tyler's student-run exhibition program, operate on a one-off basis, the new gallery provides the UArts mission with a permanent home.

The future goal of Gallery One is to establish it as a credible cradle of creativity. "Our hope is to introduce students to showing [work] in a gallery, and get beyond a classroom wall. There simply is not enough publication of students' works for the amount of time they put into their projects," says Schillhorn van Veen, a junior film student. Pooling all the rich resources of the school's faculty, student body and its location, Gallery One has managed to unite the university's artistic ambience and it rejuvenates the respect that art students deserve. As Schillhorn van Veen concluded, "We just hope it introduces the Greater Philadelphia art world to the talented, emerging artists of tomorrow." If the following exhibits keep up the momentum of the gallery's opening, then tomorrow cannot come soon enough.

“My First Time,” through Oct. 7, Gallery One, 320 S. Broad St., 215-717-6509.