Laura Kina, an artist and Vincent de Paul professor of Art, Media and Design at DePaul, was a student in painter and Japanese immigrant Michiko Itatani's painting class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kina's project, "Michiko Itatani: Painting the Cosmic Novel," is one of the inaugural exhibitions of the Virtual Asian American Art Museum, launched this fall to offer "curated materials from U.S. and international repositories to visualize, analyze, and contextualize Asian American art history."