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.
Exhibitions
Fine Arts and Flowers 2014
Presented by The Council of VMFA, the 12th Fine Arts & Flowers features floral interpretations of masterpieces from the permanent collection, presented by members of The Garden Club of Virginia, the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, and Garden Clubs of Virginia. This four-day fundraising exhibition combines fine art with floral mastery for a dazzling exhibition of beauty and creativity.
Maps of the floral exhibit placements will be available at Visitor Services.
Related Events
Presented by The Council of VMFA
Floral designs by members of the Garden Club of Virginia, Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, and Garden Clubs of Virginia.
Official Supplier of Flowers
and Plant Material
Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Barnes & Diehl, P.C.
Charles Schwarzschild Jeweler, Inc.
James River Air Conditioning Company
Lewis T. Stoneburner, Attorney
Mark Franko Custom Building
Middleburg Bank & Middleburg Trust Company
Riverfront Investment Group, LLC
Stoever & Palmore Investment Group of Wells Fargo Advisors
Westminster Canterbury Richmond
Bronze Sponsors
ADC Direct
Azzurro Ristorante
Caspari, Inc.
Chippenham Pediatrics
Costen Floors
EDC Commercial Construction
First Capital Bank
Fraiche on the Avenues
Gastrointestinal Specialists, Inc.
Handcraft Cleaners
Janet Brown Interiors
K2 Trophies & Awards, LLC MED, Inc.
Alex & Joy Paoletto
Porter Realty Company, Inc.
The Davey Tree Expert Company
The Hermitage at Cedarfield
Virginia Society of Landscape Designers
Westwood Pharmacy
Esther Mahlangu: An Artistic Residency
VMFA gives visitors the unique opportunity to watch the creation of a work of art for the permanent collection. In September, renowned South African artist Esther Mahlangu will paint two mural-scale works, which will serve as a gateway to the museum’s African Art Gallery. These 9- by 15-foot works on canvas will be the only major museum commission created by Mahlangu in North America.
Mahlangu, works in the traditional Ndebele style of bold, geometric patterns executed on a very large scale. In the late-nineteenth century, the Ndebele women painted the exteriors of their houses in this style as an expression of identity and pride. Over the years, with the development of commercial paints, the original earth tones created from natural pigments have changed to a brighter palette. Mahlangu is the first woman and only non-Westerner to paint one of the BMW Art Cars, following in the footsteps of the likes of Warhol and Lichtenstein.
As the artist climbs scaffolding and paints without a straight edge of any sort, these large works of art will evolve before visitors’ eyes over the course of a month. VMFA will document Mahlangu’s work for those who cannot watch in person. The finished work will be presented to patrons and the public in programs on October 8 and 9.
Signs of Protest: Photographs from the Civil Rights Era
Signs and protests were inseparable in the 1960s. Like a visual bullhorn, they both amplified and unified the voices fighting injustice. This exhibition includes photographs that feature protest signs, as well as images of the larger culture of resistance surrounding them, with an emphasis on Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael.
From Picasso to Magritte: European Masters from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Current Venue
Jan 25 – Aug 23, 2014 | Taubman Museum of Art | Roanoke, VA
About the Exhibition
Thirty-six works from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts make up a remarkable new traveling exhibition that made its first stop at the William King Museum in Abingdon, Virginia and is currently on display at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke. From Picasso to Magritte: European Masters from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts offers drawings and paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries that represent generations of important European artists as they journeyed away from the defined edges of Neoclassicism and toward the uninhibited marks of the modern era.
Artists on view include English painters and German Expressionists, as well as Impressionists such as Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. The works span nearly 150 years, from an 1816 drawing by Jean August Dominique Ingres to a 1960s watercolor by Georgio Morandi.
For more information on Statewide exhibitions, please contact gina.collins@vmfa.museum or phone 804.340.1650.
Identity Shifts
In conjunction with Posing Beauty, this VMFA collection-based exhibition features works by African American artists. These representations of the human figure or aspects of the body explore how we perceive and express personal and cultural identity. The selection of paintings and sculptures from the 1970s to the present features an array of perspectives and styles that underscore the complex factors informing ideas of race and gender. Many of the 21st century artists—such as iona rozeal brown, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Robert Pruitt—mix national, international, historical, and pop-culture references with personal stylistic preferences to produce images that provoke more questions about identity than they answer. The selection of photographs offers a survey of 20th- to 21st-century work—from James VanDerZee to Carrie Mae Weems to Hank Willis Thomas—while also highlighting the work of lesser-known artists, such as Richmond native Louis Draper, who played a primary role in founding the first African American photography collective, Kamoinge, in New York in 1963. Many of these works will be on view at VMFA for the first time.
Curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Posing Beauty in African American Culture
Posing Beauty in African American Culture
Identity Shifts
Japanese Dolls: Woodblock Prints by Kawase Hasui
Japanese woodblock artist Kawase Hasui (1883–1957) was primarily a landscape artist and rarely produced works featuring other subjects. However, in 1935 he designed a series of woodblock prints that focused on traditional Japanese dolls, including Imperial Palace dolls, known as gosho ningyo. That same year, the 24 ningyo prints in this series were published in an album entitled Japanese Dolls: Gosho Ningyo by Meiji-Shobo. The twelve prints on display at VMFA were selected from the album, donated by René and Carolyn Balcer.
Catching Sight: The World of the British Sporting Print
This exhibition sheds new light on a common, but often overlooked aspect of British art: the British Sporting Print. Highly sought after during the 18th and 19th centuries, these prints endure as symbols of English culture.
Featuring more than 100 prints, Catching Sight demonstrates the aesthetic sophistication and accomplishments of the genre. The exhibition takes an innovative approach to the subject, examining these works of art from an art historical perspective rather than simply as documents of the history of sport and rural culture.
By focusing on the visual language of Sporting Prints, Catching Sight demonstrates the qualities of directness, vividness, and even wit for which the genre was prized by both the larger public and artists such as Degas and Géricault, who borrowed extensively from its artistic vocabulary.
Catching Sight: The World of the British Sporting Print is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue by Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator, with contributions from Malcolm Cormack, Paul Mellon Curator Emeritus, and Corey Piper, former Curatorial Associate for the Mellon Collection.
Clare Leighton: From Pencil to Proof to Press
This display of approximately 30 drawings, prints, posters, porcelain, and books by the Anglo-American artist Clare Leighton (1898–1989) comes from a local and rarely seen private collection. Born and raised in Great Britain, she moved to America in 1939, residing first in Maryland, then North Carolina, and finally in Connecticut. Leighton occupied a central position in the Arts and Crafts revival of British wood engraving and its related developments in America. Her book illustrations set a new standard in commercially produced literature, while her writing revived interest in early-to-mid-century rural culture. As the first woman to produce a study of the art of wood engraving (Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts, 1932), Leighton played a key role in popularizing the medium. This exhibition, which complements a larger display of Leighton’s work at the University of Richmond’s Harnett Museum of Art, includes examples of her watercolors, government posters, and wood engravings for novels by Thomas Hardy as well as volumes on southern and New England country life. It is organized for VMFA by Chief Curator and Cochrane Curator of American Art Sylvia Yount.
Made in Hollywood: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation
Complementing Hollywood Costume, Made in Hollywood showcases more than 90 original vintage prints by the most important photographers working in Hollywood 1920–1960.
Selected from the Kobal Foundation collection in England the exhibition features prints of some of the greatest stars during the golden age of the film industry, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Swanson and Clark Gable.
The Foundation is the legacy of John Kobal (1940–1991) who was among the pioneering generation of Hollywood historians and among the first to examine seriously the photographs taken to promote the stars, the films, and Hollywood as place.
Hollywood Costume
Organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Hollywood Costume explores the central role costume design plays in cinematic storytelling. Bringing together the most iconic costumes from a century of cinema, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the clothes worn by unforgettable and beloved characters in films such as The Wizard of Oz, The Birds, My Fair Lady, Superman, Titanic, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and The Dark Knight Rises.
The exhibition includes cinema costumes from private and archival collections in California. Most have never been publicly displayed or seen beyond the secure walls of the studio archives. The exhibition explores in detail how the design and use of costume has been central to the creation of some of the most iconic characters in popular culture and is a key component in what is arguably the greatest art form of the 20th century: cinema.
In addition to premiering Hollywood Costume in the United States, VMFA is the only East Coast venue for the exhibition.
VMFA teams up with the Virginia Film Festival .
See Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock’s The Birds at both VMFA and the VFF in Charlottesville, plus see some of Hollywood Costumes’ films at the VFF.
Step into the Role of a Lifetime: Present a Hollywood Costume.
Spotlight Loan: Rembrandt
It is always fascinating to chart the course of a great artist from the beginning—but when the artist in question is Rembrandt, that academic exercise can also be quite thrilling. This is certainly the case with two of Rembrandt’s earliest surviving paintings.
They are on view in VMFA’s European Baroque Art Gallery beginning this December and through the next year, thanks to the generous loan from a private collection and funding from the Collector’s Circle.
Aaron Siskind and Abstract Photography of the 1950s and 60s
In a 1951 essay, the artist and art critic Elaine de Kooning described Aaron Siskind as a “painter’s photographer.” Over 60 years later he remains the photographer most closely associated with mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism. His flat picture planes, shallow depth of field, and focus on surface textures resonate with the gestural paintings of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Siskind also shared an artistic ethos with many of these painters: he emphasized the way his own feelings shaped the image as he made it and became part of the work itself.
Siskind, along with other abstract photographers of this period—such as Harry Callahan, Minor White, and Gita Lenz—broadened the expressive potential of photography and expanded the definition of abstraction. Unlike painters, these artists composed their images directly from the environment around them, actively looking and moving their camera lens as they sought inspiration in subjects as seemingly mundane as rocks and peeling letters. For the most part their subjects can be easily identified, yet they are considered abstract because extreme close-ups or unusual angles take the image out of a narrative context, allowing the viewer to experience something familiar in a new way.
The exhibition includes a dozen of Siskind’s photographs and three to four each from Callahan, White, and Lenz. It will overlap with the final two months of Gesture: Judith Godwin and Abstract Expressionism, offering museum visitors an opportunity to further consider the relationship of abstract photography and painting. Curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
“ What I am conscious of and what I feel is the picture I am making.” — Aaron Siskind, Credo, 1950
“ The world about us, penetrated with imagination, is abstract enough.” — Gita Lenz, 1951
Say What? How Ancient Writing Began
As early civilizations developed, societies became more complicated. Record keeping and communication demanded something beyond symbols and pictures to represent the spoken word. Say What? How Ancient Writing Began Exhibition explores the early writing systems of four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica.
Here you’ll also learn about the Rosetta Stone, the 19th-century discovery that gave scholars the key that unlocked the language of ancient Egypt.
Exhibition supported by the Memorial Foundation for Children Endowment
American Art from the McGlothlin Collection
American Art from the McGlothlin Collection features more than 70 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture and offer a remarkable in depth survey of American art from the antebellum to modern period.
Coinciding with the opening of the American Galleries in the new McGlothlin Wing, the exhibition includes major works by artists such as George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, William Merrit Chase, Childe Hassam, Martin Johnson Heade, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, George Luks, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler. All the works exhibited are promised gifts to VMFA and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr Sylvia Yount, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art
A full color catalogue featuring an interview with collectors Jim and Fran McGlothlin accompanies the exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by The Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment.
Matisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris
Matisse, Picasso, and Modern Art in Paris presents highlights of the collection of Virginia native T. Catesby Jones. An admirer of modern French art of the 1920s and 30s, Jones purchased works from the best-known figures of the era, including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Masson and Lipchitz.
His bequest of paintings, sculptures, and drawings moved VMFA to the forefront of American museums with collections of contemporary European work. Jones also donated works to the University of Virginia and this is the first time these collections have been reunited.
Significant works in the exhibition include two 1917 Matisse paintings of the Italian model Lorette, Picasso’s Rose Period portrait of a “Woman with a Kerchief”, Dufy’s 1929 “Reclining Nude”, and a powerful 1914 Cubist collage by Juan Gris. A full-color, 147 page catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Curated by Matthew Affron, Curator of Modern Art, University of Virginia Art Museum and John Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The exhibition has recently completed a successful tour of partner museums throughout Virginia.
The exhibition is supported by VMFA’s Fabergé Ball Endowment and the exhibition tour was supported by Altria Group.
Tiffany: Color and Light
The first major exhibition to be shown at VMFA after the grand opening of the McGlothlin Wing celebrates one of America’s greatest artists. Tiffany: Color and Light is the most important exhibition of the work of renowned designer and master of glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) in a generation and VMFA will be the only American museum to show the exhibition.
Drawing on the finest collections in Europe, North America, and Russia, the exhibition presents Tiffany as an artist of international stature and significance. Curated by the world’s leading scholars, the exhibition focuses on his primary achievements – the innovative techniques and artistry he developed to achieve original and spectacular effects in glass. Among the exhibition’s more than 180 objects are examples of the leaded-glass windows and lamps for which he is best known as well as blown-glass vessels and decorative objects such as mosaics, jewelry, bronzes, paintings, watercolors, architectural elements, and silver. Eight newly restored windows from the Erskine and American United Church in Montreal – considered one of his most spectacular commissions – have never before been shown in the United States and will form a dazzling and memorable centerpiece to the presentation.
he exhibition also explores Tiffany’s long and varied career: his early life as a painter studying and traveling in Europe; the links to his father’s firm, Tiffany & Company; his work as an interior designer incorporating glass in the designs he created for some of the notable figures of his day; his relationship with the Parisian art dealer Siegfrid Bing, who distributed his work in Europe; the techniques he used to create leaded-glass windows for religious buildings and private homes; and his development of Favrile glass, a process he patented and used to make iridescent vases and other decorative arts objects.
Conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and organized in collaboration with VMFA and the Musée de Luxembourg, where it debuted last September.
The exhibition’s curators are Rosalind Pepall, senior curator of decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Martin Eidelberg, professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. The exhibition is organized at VMFA by Barry Shifman, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Decorative Arts from 1890 to the Present.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Faberge Society | The Founders of VMFA and sponsored by Altria Group.