Inspired by the archive of Richmond native Louis Draper, VMFA has organized an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the first twenty years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of African American photographers he helped to found in 1963. More than 180 photographs by fifteen of the early members—Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Danny Dawson, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, Al Fennar, Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Jimmie Mannas Jr., Herb Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson—reveal the vision and commitment of this remarkable group of artists.

When the collective began in New York City, they selected the name Kamoinge, which means “a group of people acting and working together” in Gikuyu, the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya. They met weekly, exhibited and published together, and pushed each other to expand the boundaries of photography as an art form during a critical era of Black self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s.

The group organized several shows in their own gallery space, in addition to exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the International Center for Photography. They were also the driving force behind The Black Photographers Annual, a publication founded by Kamoinge member Beuford Smith, which featured the work of a wide variety of Black photographers at a time when mainstream publications offered them few opportunities.

In the continuing spirit of Kamoinge, Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, Herb Robinson, and Tony Barboza have also made significant archival contributions and are among the nine members who recorded oral histories to provide the fullest account of the group’s first two decades. In addition, through a generous grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, VMFA has digitized the Draper archive—which will be available online.

Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop
is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Sponsored By

Altria Group
Fabergé Ball Endowment
Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund

Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Michael Schewel and Priscilla Burbank

Wayne and Nancy Chasen Family Fund of the Community Foundation for a greater Richmond

Drs. Ronald A. and Betty Neal Crutcher
Philip and Kay Davidson

Generous support for this project was provided by Bank of America Art Conservation Project
and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Marketing support for Evans Court exhibitions is provided by the Charles G. Thalhimer Fund.

This list is complete as of November 20, 2019.

The work of groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artist Howardena Pindell opens this August in VMFA’s Evans Court and 21st-Century Galleries. For nearly five decades, Howardena Pindell has explored the intersection of art and activism. This  exhibition looks at the arc of this artist’s career through the presentation of early and recent paintings, video art, as well as works on paper that celebrate her singular vision and its imprint on contemporary art since the 1960s.

Video Drawings: Swimming, 1975, chromogenic print. MCA Chicago, Anixter Art Acquisition Fund. Photo courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Untitled #20 (Dutch Wives Circled and Squared) (detail), 1978, mixed media on canvas. MCA Chicago, Gift of Albert A. Robin by exchange. Photo courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Untitled, 1972–1973, acrylic and cut and punched papers on canvas. Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment © Howardena Pindell

Untitled #5B (Krakatoa), 2007, mixed media on paper collage. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Untitled, c. 1968, acrylic and cray-pas on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Autobiography: India (Lakshmi), 1984, mixed media on board. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Untitled #58, 1974, mixed media on board. JK Brown and Eric Diefenbach, New York

Night Flight, 2015–16, mixed media on canvas. Garth Greenan Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

This exhibition is the first major survey of the New York-based artist. It features early figurative paintings, her explorations into abstraction and conceptual practices, as well as personal and political art that emerged in the aftermath of a life-threatening car accident in 1979. Sub-themes in the exhibition—such as pre-1979, memoirist, traveler, activist, and scientist— help trace themes and visual experiments that run throughout Pindell’s work up to the present.

Trained as a painter, Pindell has challenged the staid traditions of the art world and asserted her place in its history as a woman and one of African descent. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of the rigid tradition of rectangular canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, such as obsessively generating paper dots with an ordinary hole punch then affixing the pigmented chads onto the surfaces of her paintings. Despite the effort exerted in the creation of these paintings, Pindell’s use of rich colors and unconventional materials gives the finished works a sumptuous and ethereal quality.

The work created in the aftermath of a 1979 car accident that left her with short-term amnesia not only reintroduces figuration into the work, but also asserts the artist’s activist sensibilities.  Expanding on the experimental formal language she previously developed, Pindell has explored a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political. Her Autobiography series not only literally and figuratively traced her body into her work, but also transformed ordinary material such as postcards from her global travels and photographs into incredible works of art.  Pindell’s photo-based collages emerged as an act of memory reconstruction after the car accident. Other bodies of work, such as her Rambo series, respond to broader cultural concerns and critique sexism, racism, and discrimination at large.

Paintings and large-scale works will be shown in the 21st-Century Galleries, while additional paintings, works on paper, and a video will be shown in the Evans Court Galleries.

Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Presented by

Canvas at VMFA

Peter and Nancy Huber

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Papa

Marketing support for Evans Court exhibitions is provided by the Charles G. Thalhimer Fund.

Lead support for Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris: Caryn and King Harris, Katherine Harris, Toni and Ron Paul, Pam and Joe Szokol, Linda and Bill Friend, and Stephanie and John Harris; Kenneth C. Griffin; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Marilyn and Larry Fields.

Major support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Charlotte Cramer Wagner and Herbert S. Wagner III of the Wagner Foundation, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, and Nathan Cummings Foundation, with the support and encouragement of Jane Saks.

Additional generous support provided by Garth Greenan Gallery.

While visiting the Burmese capital of Rangoon in 1912, English artist Ernest Stephen Lumsden chanced upon a tourist guide containing a small photograph of the Ganges River at Benares. Inspired, the master etcher rushed to the holy city, commencing a decades-long fascination with India. Approximately 125 plates—more than a third of Lumsden’s lifetime output—are of Indian imagery, collected during four trips to the British colony over the next 25 years.

The Pagoda Platform (Primary Title), 1912, Etching printed in black ink on laid paper. Gift of Frank Raysor

1912, Ernest Stephen Lumsden (English, 1883–1948), etching printed in black ink on laid paper. Gift of Frank Raysor

Worshippers (Primary Title), 1919, Etching printed in black ink on wove. Gift of Frank Raysor

1928, Ernest Stephen Lumsden (English, 1883–1948), etching printed in black ink on laid paper. Gift of Frank Raysor

1919, Medium, Etching printed in black ink on wove paper. Gift of Frank Raysor

1925, Etching printed in black ink on laid paper with two watermarks (Initial). Gift of Frank Raysor

His landscapes, city views, and descriptions of everyday life continue the European tradition of picturing far-flung domains; however Lumsden seems to resist much of his predecessors’ impulse to romanticize and exoticize. While undeniably enchanted by the country, he nonetheless offers a relatively sober vision of India, one that suggests an easy, contented interaction with its places and peoples. Praised by his contemporaries, Lumsden’s technical virtuosity includes an economy of line, carefully built compositions, and, above all, a command over depicting India’s intense light.

Light and Line’s 19 prints, presented in VMFA’s South Asian galleries, are recent gifts to the museum from the Frank Raysor Collection. The exhibition is curated by Dr. John Henry Rice, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of South Asian Art, with Curatorial Intern Samina Iqbal.

Access our FREE Beyond the Walls audio tour app on your iPad! Click below to download the app from iTunes.

The Memorial Foundation for Children Teaching Gallery, located in the MWV Art Education Center, has been transformed into an interactive exhibition where visitors can explore daily life in imperial China. In contrast to the world of the emperor on display in Forbidden City, this hands-on exhibition provides a glimpse into the home of a merchant-class family who lived in the 18th century.

Beyond The Walls visitors are able to interact through activities that include writing Chinese characters on a touch screen and designing personal, virtual seals. There are also opportunities to unroll and view reproduction scrolls, like those featured in Forbidden City and in VMFA’s East Asian collection, or play traditional musical instruments and games. Whether visiting as part of a school group, or a multigenerational family, the Teaching Gallery exhibition offers visitors of all ages a new perspective on China’s imperial past.

The Beyond the Walls exhibition is generously sponsored by:

The Community Foundation Serving Richmond & Central Virginia

Memorial Foundation for Children

The Jeanann Gray Dunlap Foundation

Miwako Nishizawa is a California-based Japanese-American artist specializing in the traditional shin-hanga Japanese woodblock technique that revitalized the ukiyo-e tradition in early 20th century Japan. As part of their interest in the work of shin-hanga artist Kawase Hasui, collectors René and Carolyn Balcer commissioned Nishizawa to execute “Twelve Views of Virginia” in the shin-hanga style. This exhibition uses working drawings and artist proofs from the series to demonstrate the technique. These will be exhibited at the same time as a large exhibition of works by Hasui in the Evans Court Gallery.

This exhibition presents a visually compelling selection of Japanese woodblock prints — as well as paintings and didactic material — that explores the dynamic early work of Japanese landscape artist Kawase Hasui (1883-1957). Through the work of Hasui, the exhibition explores the themes of nostalgia and longing — the search for individual and national identity in Japan during the early Taisho period, an era of dizzying social and cultural change. It presents the best work of one of Japan’s modern masters, featuring high quality objects that are compelling visually, often rare, and broadly resonant. The core themes of this art — the exploration of the native landscape and the discovery of a new urban beauty in response to the anonymity of modern life — are as relevant to American audiences now as they were to Japan in the 1920s.

The works selected for this exhibition focus on Hasui’s most creative period of woodblock print design: the years from 1918 to the Great Earthquake of 1923. The exhibition utilizes the unparalleled collection donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by preeminent Hasui collectors, René and Carolyn Balcer.

The exhibition is curated by Kendall Brown, Professor of Asian Art History at California State University, Long Beach, and author of earlier books on Hasui and several catalogues on modern Japanese prints. It will be accompanied by a major catalogue including essays by leading scholars from North America and Japan.

Carolyn Hsu-Balcer and René Balcer

E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation

Christie’s

The Japan Foundation

Robert Frank photographs Beat poet Allen Ginsberg hugging a tree, Imogen Cunningham poses Alfred Stieglitz standing in front of a flower painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, and Barbara Morgan captures modern dancer Martha Graham as she stretches her body into a dramatic form; these images convey more than a mere likeness of the artists portrayed. Instead they highlight the collaboration between photographer and subject when both are artists seeking to convey a unique persona.

This exhibition features photographic portraits of fine artists, writers, and performers taken throughout the 20th century. From the softly focused, romantic images the Pictorialists made in the early 1900s to the casual color polaroids Andy Warhol took of the celebrities around him in the early 1970s, these works also trace the evolving styles and functions of photography as it documented artistic movements and increasingly served as a primary artistic medium in itself. Artists as Art is curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Two recently acquired works in the African collection provide insight into far-reaching social and economic changes associated with the independence movement that swept across Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, bringing an end to European colonialism officially, if not in reality. The upbeat Barber’s Sign from Ghana, infused with the optimism of the new era, suggests modern hairstyles for fashionable personal identity, while celebrating the name Ghana along with the red, yellow, green, and black state colors the new nation adopted after declaring autonomy from Britain in 1957.

Revealing another aspect of the transition, the haunting photo montage, Untitled 21, from the suite Mémoire, by Congolese artist, Sammy Baloji investigates the impact of industrial development in the Belgian Congo during the colonial era and its demise after independence in 1960. In this focus installation, both the sign and the photo montage are presented with related works to portray the historic context more broadly and cast a sharper focus on the nature of the changes in society and art that have played out in Africa during the second half of the 20th century.

“The Great War” changed the face of the world when it began on July 28, 1914. The story of World War I and the emotions it brought on are told through prints by British and American artists such as Muirhead Bone, Kerr Eby, Childe Hassam, James McBey, and Claude Shepperson. The works depict scenes of combat in France and the Near East, life on the home front in the United States and England, and the war’s aftermath and its commemoration. All of the prints come from the Frank Raysor Collection, a promised gift to the museum. Curated by Dr. Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art.

Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit will explore this contemporary artist’s creative process for his 2009 painting Art History Is Not Linear (VMFA). Commissioned by VMFA, this 16-panel painting contains 200 icons inspired by works from the museum’s collection. A three-part exhibition, the first gallery will provide a glimpse of McGinness’s studio practice, the second will display a selection of the objects McGinness chose from the museum collection alongside his sketches and final image, and the last portion will show early works the artist made while growing up in Virginia Beach. The exhibition will engage a wide audience, and an exciting array of education programs will especially encourage young viewers to seek out their own favorite works in the collection and actively participate in their own process of exploration and interpretation.