Framing their degrees

The scramble for success in the art world isn’t easy. But lately, dealers hungry to find the next stars are sniffing them out before they’ve even got their master of fine arts degrees. If you want to spot a rising artist, now’s a good time. Boston is home to some top-notch art schools, and most of the MFA thesis shows are this spring. We spoke to five promising graduates.

Lydia Musco, 28

Musco grew up carving in her father’s woodshop in Royalston. At BU, she’s taken to concrete, building columns out of cast concrete plates. The square plates are anything but perfect: They warp, crumble, pock, and swell, making for stacks that appear inwardly fluid. As in ‘‘Looking for Garnets’’, they’re like the earth’s strata, solid but forever evolving.

‘‘I cast all the separate individual layers at once,’’ Musco says. ‘‘I can take them apart. Each layer is manageable by me. I wanted to deal with something on a larger scale, but within my own ability. I’m trying to figure out scale and space relationships. I think it comes from living in the city. How is scale important to the power of an object?

‘‘I’ve always had a difficult time with color and form together. In this process, I mixed color in with the concrete, so the color is integrated with the material before it becomes form. I started with individual colors, and now I’m doing multiple colors in one pillar, dealing with layers as a line of color. There’s always something else. The newest, most exciting thing seems to lead to the next one.’’

Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo, 30

The Peruvian Barboza-Gubo ravenously embraces a range of sources and styles in his paintings. A single canvas, such as one from his ‘‘Pope Series,’’ which whirls around three central papal figures, or his ‘‘Pieta Series IV’’, may refer to Catholicism, Peruvian and pre-Columbian iconography, Renaissance imagery, Spain’s colonization of Peru, Spanish architecture, the artist’s own family, and more, all emerging from and disappearing into vaporous abstract flourishes.

‘‘I have issues with Catholicism,’’ Barboza-Gubo says. ‘‘I believe in God, in religion, but I think the human part of the church is not right. My big painting with the three popes in the fire came from a painting done by Incans learning how to paint from Spaniards. The characters are in open space and in darkness. There’s fire. The popes are blessing, but at the same time their crowns are disappearing.

‘‘In other works, I paint on shaped wood. They’re the shadows of popes. ..... The interior is abstract. I’m talking about your shadow as your soul. ..... It’s your animal part, your emotions, the human part of everyone. ..... Even the most powerful people are just humans.’’

Francois-Xavier de Costerd

Taking his cue from fellow Frenchman Claude Lelouch’s rollicking 1977 short film %‘‘C’était un Rendez-vous,’’ a hair-raising tear through Paris, in ‘‘Passager Momentane 2007’’ de Costerd brings his viewers on a gorgeous three-channel video ride from East Boston to the South End and back. The central video keeps your eyes on the road, but on either side the city unfolds — streets lined with chain-link fences, the smoke plumes of industry.

‘‘I love the city. I’m infuriated with the city. It’s fascinating. It has this pregnant power,’’ de Costerd says. ‘‘I’m playing with the city as a body, with these arteries and this flow of humans like blood cells going through. ..... These plumes are sublime. Then you realize it’s the power plant, squeezing into the air we breathe. The city needs it. On cold days, it cranks like crazy — the cancerous lung of the city.

‘‘I plan on hopefully turning this project into a series, do more cities, work with sound and music artists, take the technological level up a notch. I’d like more screens, so people are surrounded by them, roads coming at them. This project has taken over my life.’’

Emily Diehl, 26

Diehl grew up in Virginia and attended the Atlanta College of Art before she came north to the Museum School. She paints modernist architecture on large-scale canvases, usually interiors, as in the untitled work below. While strictly representational, they border on the crisply abstract, thanks to what they depict.

‘‘Architecture has always showed up in my work,’’ Diehl says. ‘‘It had to do with studying the Bauhaus in school, reading about those utopian ideals. I was attracted to the absurdness of their rhetoric, their outdated way of talking about the future. ..... It’s impossible to think that way now. Modernism goes hand in hand with colonialism, imposing beliefs on other people. ..... But what is the alternative? How do we discuss the future? It’s a tall order for a painting.

‘‘The idea of utopian architecture was parallel to abstract painting. I grew up being curious about this time. I thought it was better than the time I grew up in. ..... So I’m attracted, jealous, and critical.

‘‘At some point, you leave the intellectual stuff behind and concentrate on what you’re making. There’s a fine balance between being too much in your head and [simply] making something.’’

Irina Rozovsky, 25

Born in Moscow, Rozovsky moved to Boston with her family in 1989 and studied French and Spanish literature at Tufts. She was recently chosen to be featured in the book ‘‘25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers,’’ selected by Sylvia Plachy and due out next year from powerHouse Books and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Her photo ‘‘Mama reaching up’’ is above.

‘‘My show is titled ‘My Mother and Other Things from the Sky,’.’’ Rozovsky says. ‘‘There are a couple of pictures of my mom, but really she’s a stand-in. It’s about skies, things falling. I want to give a sense of gravity. There’s a boy wanting to fly, but being pulled to the earth. ‘Mother’ here really means something mythological, something to reach up to, as if mother is the universe.

‘‘There’s one picture of a bird falling, not flying. It’s about the emotion, the sensation of falling, and of rising up. We try to get up into the sky, and always end up coming down.’’