Xu Bing: Tobacco Project explores the production and culture of tobacco as seen through the eyes of one of China’s most innovative contemporary artists. The exhibition combines important pieces from the artist’s earlier projects at Duke University in North Carolina and the Shanghai Gallery of Art in China with new work inspired by visits to tobacco farms, warehouses, and cigarette factories in Virginia. Altogether the exhibition spans a dozen years of Xu Bing’s work and surveys one of his most ambitious undertakings.

Background on the Artist

Xu Bing is considered one of the most important Chinese artists of his generation. Born in 1955, he lived through a tumultuous period in China’s history. After being sent to the countryside as a teen during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Beijing to study and then teach printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts during successive waves of tightening and loosening government control over the arts. A central and controversial figure in the Chinese New Wave movement, he moved to the United States in 1990 shortly after the Tiananmen uprising.

In 1999 Xu Bing was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his contributions, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy. A number of awards followed, including the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2003, the Wales International Visual Art Prize “Artes Mundi” in 2004, and the Southern Graphics Council Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Xu Bing was appointed vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of the most important positions in the Chinese art system, in 2008.

A prolific and versatile artist, Xu Bing has created a range of works that explore traditional and experimental bookmaking and printmaking (best exemplified by his iconic installation Book from the Sky) and language (including his invention of Square Word Calligraphy and the ongoing Book from the Ground), as well as animals and nature.

Xu Bing has had solo exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona; and the National Gallery of Prague. He has also shown his work at many major international group exhibitions including the 45th and 51st Venice Biennales, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Johannesburg Biennale. Over the years, his work has appeared in high-school and college textbooks around the world including Abrams’ Art Past–Art Present, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, and Greg Clunas’s Chinese Art, which is part of the Oxford History of Art series.

VMFA Exhibition

Xu Bing uses tobacco—as a material and a subject—to explore a wide range of issues, from global trade and exploitation to the ironies of advertising a potentially harmful substance. As a print- and bookmaker, he is especially fascinated by the visual culture of packaging and marketing tobacco. When Duke University invited Xu Bing to be the artist in residence in 2000, he was drawn into the history of the Duke family, which led to his first Tobacco Project. He followed that with a second Tobacco Project in Shanghai in 2004. He sees the Virginia Tobacco Project as the third in a trilogy.

Xu Bing’s interest in “tobacco culture” extends to the historical impact of China’s large-scale exportation of tobacco products from the United States beginning in the late 19th century. For the Durham exhibition, he made a gigantic book of tobacco leaves that was gradually devoured by beetles during the course of the exhibition. For Traveling Down the River, he constructed a thirty-feet-long cigarette laid over a reproduction of a hand-scroll of the celebrated classical Chinese painting Along the River during the Qingming Festival. As the cigarette burned, it left scorch marks on the image, inscribing time as a serpentine scar and the journey as a residue of ash. An installation created in an abandoned tobacco plant near Duke included a recorded voice reading the medical records of Xu Bing’s father, who died of lung cancer, conveying a personal connection to tobacco and death. In exploring the complex connections between people and tobacco, the project ultimately concerns fundamental issues of human culture and of tobacco as a medium of social exchange.

One work in the exhibition, Backbone, is a collaboration between Xu Bing and his friend René Balcer, who created a free-verse blues poem using prints of historic tobacco slogans. A sound recording of the poem, performed by Captain Luke (vocals) and Big Ron Hunter (guitar), is available on iTunes.

The VMFA exhibition consists of selected works from these exhibitions combined with new works inspired by the time Xu Bing spent in Virginia. His first visits to the Commonwealth included a tour of the Philip Morris manufacturing center in Richmond—one of the largest cigarette production facility in the world—and trips to the Southside region of Virginia to see an historic tobacco warehouse and several family-owned tobacco farms. He also did research at the Virginia Historical Society and the Valentine Richmond History Center.

Xu Bing recently concluded a two-week residency in Richmond, during which time he worked on several large pieces, some entirely new and some recreations of past pieces that no longer exist or cannot travel. The new pieces include a three hundred-pound solid block of compressed tobacco embossed with the text “light as smoke”; a book of fifty historic tobacco slogans redesigned and printed on cigarette paper to form a bound volume of poetry; wooden boxes stamped with the logo “Puff Choice” and made to hold “double cigarettes”—two cigarettes joined to a double-length filter. Refabrications of earlier pieces include a colossal book made of tobacco leaves, resembling the Duke book described above, but with new text; a recreation of Traveling Down the River, including a forty-one-feet long version of the scroll and an equally long cigarette that will burn down its length; and a large arrangement of dried branches called Match Flower, with each of the hundreds of tips coated in red match phosphorous. Working with former graduate students from Virginia Commonwealth University’s highly regarded School of the Arts, he also created the template for a large installation piece that forms the climax of the exhibition: a tiger-skin-pattern rug made from over half a million cigarettes standing on end, with either filter or tip up to make an alternating pattern of orange and white.

Xu Bing: Tobacco Project is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition will travel to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, opening in January 2012.

Catalogue

A scholarly catalogue accompanies the exhibition, providing a comprehensive overview of Xu Bing’s tobacco projects. The catalogue, published by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, includes several essays along with reproductions of all the tobacco works.

Given Xu Bing’s international stature and the interest among scholars and students in his work, VMFA plans to organize a weekend symposium featuring lectures, panels, and roundtable discussions with top scholars in the field. All participants have given verbal confirmation.

Nature Reined: The Paintings of Clarice Smith exhibition — in the Mellon Focus Galleries — is selected to complement the works in the adjacent Mellon Collection and includes paintings of horse racing and still lifes, two of the most persistent themes in Smith’s work.

Clarice Smith is an established Virginia artist who has exhibited in America and Europe for three decades, most recently at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.

Temples and Shrines in Japan exhibition features fifteen woodblock prints by Japanese artist Kawase Hasui. They were selected from more than 320 Hasui prints donated to VMFA by René and Carolyn Balcer in 2006. Created from 1924 through 1953, these works, which focus on scenes of temples and shrines across Japan, celebrate the architecture of sacred sites and their relationship with nature.

Hasui created more than six hundred woodblock color prints throughout his career. As an acclaimed painter and printmaker, he illustrated landscapes, townscapes, and sacred landmarks in Japan. He was named a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government in 1956.

Early in his career, Hasui worked primarily as a commercial illustrator for magazines and in advertising. His career path changed in 1918 when he was inspired by the prints of Ito Shinsui and began to create prints of his own. That same year, Hasui’s first experimental prints were published by Watanabe Shōzaburō, initiating a relationship that would last for the rest of Hasui’s life.

Watanabe named the prints created by Hasui and others shin-hanga, meaning “new prints.” By bringing together the talents of an artist, a block carver, a printer or block colorist, and a publisher, shin-hanga works mimicked the traditional collaborative process of ukiyo-e printmaking. Instead of the flat, stylized planes typical in ukiyo-e, shin-hanga incorporated aspects of Western draftsmanship and printmaking, including perspective and volumetric shading.

Modern Masters exhibition features monumental paintings by two of today’s most accomplished painters, Sean Scully and John Walker. Promised gifts from Pamela K. and William A. Royall Jr. on the occasion of VMFA’s 75th anniversary, these works affirm the unique capacity of paint to evoke the immateriality of light. Rounding out the exhibition are a suite of twelve photographs by Scully and four other recent paintings by Walker.

Sean Scully, born in Ireland in 1945, and John Walker, born in England in 1939, are both longtime residents of the United States and are among today’s most accomplished painters. While these artists do not usually exhibit together, their works are both featured here by the happy circumstance of promised gifts by Richmond collectors Pam and Bill Royall. These generous donors have offered Walker’s North Branch II and Sean Scully’s Cut Ground Red Blue to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on the occasion of the museum’s 75th anniversary. Each of these monumental works exemplifies the artists’ dedication to the nuances, traditions, and paradoxes of painting. And each suffuses abstract forms with references to the visible world of landscapes, man-made structures, and light.

Walker’s North Branch II, along with his three other recent paintings in the exhibition, reflects a love for the Maine coast. Over the past decade, he has drawn inspiration from a tidal cove at Seal Point near the Damariscotta River. Often created outdoors, his canvases respond to the landscape and its changing atmosphere by incorporating references to water, clouds, rainbows, trees, and earth. He even uses actual mud from the cove, and the rough texture provides a dynamic gestural presence offering a stark contrast to prismatic strokes of bright color that conjure the ethereal nature of light. Through such means, Walker’s paintings balance realistic landscapes with painterly abstraction, attending equally to space and surface.

Scully’s Cut Ground Red Blue builds on his interest in architecture. Scully was first inspired to paint geometric units of color during a 1972 trip to Morocco, where the stripes and bands of carpets and tents left a strong impression on him. After visiting Mexico in the early 1980s, he transformed his stripes into bricks of color. Over time, his stroke has softened, revealing underlayers of paint and infusing his minimalist, abstract images with a humanistic touch that expresses a wide range of emotions and ideas.

The exhibition also includes a suite of twelve photographs that Scully made in the Dominican Republic showing brightly painted shacks. Scully began taking photographs in 1979 but only began exhibiting them in the late 1990s. Although the photographs do not serve as models for his paintings, Scully’s focus on the doors and surrounding wood clapboards of dwellings parallel the compositions of his paintings to a remarkable degree and reflect some of the same interests in light, architecture, pattern, weathering, and the handmade.

Modern Masters: New Paintings by Sean Scully and John Walker is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. All works are either promised gifts or loans from Pamela K. and William A. Royall Jr.

Tristin Lowe’s colossal sculpture Mocha Dick is a fifty-two-feet-long recreation of the real-life albino sperm whale that terrorized early 19th-century whaling vessels near Mocha Island in the South Pacific. Mocha Dick, described in appearance as “white as wool,” engaged in battle with numerous whaling expeditions and inspired Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick (1851). Lowe worked with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia to make the sculpture: a large-scale vinyl inflatable understructure sheathed in white industrial felt.

Tristin Lowe’s massive sculpture takes its name, anatomy, color, and inspiration from a legendary albino sperm whale that inhabited the South Pacific waters near Mocha Island in the early 19th century. Vividly chronicled by a New England seafarer and published in the monthly Knickerbocker magazine (1839), the creature was said to have attacked as many as twenty whaling vessels. The graphic account describes the elusive behemoth, known as Mocha Dick, as a ghostly presence: “As white as wool . . . as white as a snow drift . . . white as the surf around him.” This notorious creature was especially striking because sperm whales are commonly dark gray, brown, or black.

The great 19th-century work of art that also drew its inspiration from this infamous white whale is Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick, published in 1851. Lowe’s reckoning with the mythic mammal can be traced to his fascination with Melville’s novel and his research into maritime history. He built his fifty-two-foot sculpture true to the scale of a sperm whale. The work has a coat of thick wool felt covering an inflated vinyl armature. Clusters of handcrafted barnacles are appliquéd to the whale’s body and scar-like stitches zigzag across its surface. These naturalistic embellishments attest to the creature’s long years spent roaming the seas, battling giant squid and predatory seafarers.

As in the Melville novel, Lowe’s work expresses a profound awe and empathy for the beleaguered beast. “This project was like the story of Moby-Dick—embarking on a journey, transfixed by the call of the sea,” Lowe says. “It is not about Ahab’s quest for revenge, and not even about the whale itself, but more about Ishmael’s search for the unattainable.”

Lowe created Mocha Dick during a six-month collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, involving a team of technicians, apprentices, and a project manager, supervised by the artist. The completed sculpture is fifty-two-feet long—the size of a real-life sperm whale—and weighs approximately seven hundred pounds.

Lowe (born 1966) studied at Parsons School of Design before earning a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Lowe’s choice of medium has always been low-tech and low-brow, allowing him as an artist to explore unorthodox new directions and materials in his work. He has had solo exhibitions at New Langton Arts in San Francisco (1998), the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (1999), and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin (2005), and his work has been widely exhibited in numerous Philadelphia group shows at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and Moore College of Art and Design. His work has been acquired by major museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Tristin Lowe: Mocha Dick is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The sculpture is on loan courtesy of the West Collection, Philadelphia and was created in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.

All images courtesy of Fleisher/Ollman Gallery and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Ansel Adams and Lewis Baltz occupy opposite ends of the landscape photography spectrum. Adams’s works feature sublime views of national parks. Baltz turned his camera on a fair more prosaic subject: a wasteland littered with trash. This exhibition explores each artist’s different photographic perspectives as well as their concern for the environment.

Curated by Sarah Eckhardt, VMFA Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Featuring more than 100 objects from the internationally renowned Egyptian collection of the British Museum, Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb explores the rituals of death and burial in ancient Egypt and uncovers mysteries that have shrouded mummies for millennia.

There are few civilizations that have aroused as much interest and intrigue as that of Ancient Egypt. With its distinctive artistic heritage and vast monumental remains, Egypt has held a continuing fascination for outsiders throughout time. And perhaps nothing has piqued people’s interest more than its funerary beliefs and practices.

In this riveting exhibition, we focus on the life and death of Nesperennub, a temple priest who lived 3,000 years ago. The exhibition opens with a 3-D film*, narrated by Patrick Stewart, which shows the virtual unwrapping of Nesperennub’s mummy using the most advanced scanning technology currently available. Peering beneath the linen wrapping, visitors will see how this temple priest may have looked and lived. These vivid details provide insight into the process of mummification as well as life expectancy, health, and disease in ancient Egypt.

In addition to Nesperennub’s mummy and coffin, visitors will view more than 100 objects related to Egyptian society and its funerary rituals, as well as learn the importance of these objects in ensuring eternal life. Some of the objects in the exhibition include additional human and animal mummies; a gilded mask; Egyptian jewelry; canopic jars used for preserving the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines of the deceased; massive sarcophagi lids; statuary; and tomb lintels.

*Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb is complemented by a 21-minute, realistic 3-D movie shown prior to the exhibition. After 2,800 years, technology has unlocked much information about the mummy of Egyptian priest Nesperennub, including age, family, health, mummification practices, and ritual elements. The content is recommended for visitors age seven to adult.

The Jewels of Jean Schlumberger exhibition features more than 30 lavish and fantastical examples of jewelry and decorative objects by the French designer Jean Schlumberger (1907 – 1987).

Fifty-six dramatic black-and-white photographs taken by Alfred Wertheimer in 1956. The photographs feature Elvis Presley on the brink of international superstardom — including intimate images taken in Richmond.

Wertheimer was hired by RCA Victor in 1956 to shoot promotional images of Elvis, who had just been signed to record for the label. Wertheimer’s images provide viewers today with a look at Elvis before he exploded onto the rock-and-roll scene. Wertheimer was given total access to Elvis on the road, backstage, in concert, in the recording studio and at home in Memphis. Shortly after Wertheimer had completed his assignment, “Colonel” Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, restricted contact with his star.

“Henri Cartier-Bresson was known for photographing what he called the ‘decisive moment,’ that moment when everything falls into place,” says Wertheimer. “But I was more interested in the moments before or after the decisive moment.”

The elaborate tombs of the dukes of Burgundy are among the masterpieces of late medieval sculpture in Europe. The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy presents thirty-seven alabaster mourners, considered embodiments of late medieval devotion and piety. They convey powerful emotion, some lost in thought or giving vent to their grief, and others consoling their neighbors. Mourning, they remind us, is a collective experience, common to all people and all moments in history.

The Dukes of Burgundy were the wealthiest and most powerful aristocrats in northern Europe and oversaw a magnificent court. Although artists in every medium worked for them, it was the achievement of their sculptors in the 14th century that produced the most profound and original art. From the studio of the great Claus Sluter emerged sculpture that rivaled – some argue surpassed – anything done in Italy at the time. The summit of their achievement were the tombs of the Burgundian Dukes.

The elaborate tombs of the first Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and his son, John the Fearless, are among the masterpieces of late medieval sculpture in Europe. These monuments feature the sculpted figures of the deceased rulers lying in state atop the tombs, while below a procession of mourning figures appears to slip in and out of the arcades of a cloister. The mourners are intended to evoke the funeral processions of the dukes, events that brought together various elements of Burgundian society: nobility, clergy, and laypersons. They convey powerful emotion, some lost in thought or giving vent to their grief, and others consoling their neighbors. Mourning, they remind us, is a collective experience, common to all people and all moments in history.

The tombs were originally installed in a monastery outside Dijon, but since the early nineteenth century they have been on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Dijon. Renovations of the museum’s medieval galleries have created the occasion for American audiences to discover for themselves these celebrated sculptures. The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy at VMFA features thirty-seven mourners from the tomb of John the Fearless, second duke of Burgundy, displayed independently of the tomb’s architectural framework – offering a unique opportunity to appreciate these sculptures for their precise naturalism, variety, and profoundly moving character.

For more information, including 3-D views of each sculpture, please visit mourners.org.

VMFA is the final venue in the United States, and when the sculptures return to the Musée des Beaux-arts de Dijon in 2012, they will be permanently repositioned in the tomb setting.

The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy has been organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon, under the auspices of FRAME (French Regional and American Museum Exchange). The exhibition is supported by a leadership gift from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Florence Gould Foundation, the Eugene McDermott Foundation, Connie Goodyear Baron and Boucheron. Major corporate support is provided by Bank of the West – Member BNP Paribas Group. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Drawn from the local collection of Margaret and John Gottwald, Making History: 20th Century African American Art explores black artistic production and patronage through art previously in the collection of the Barnett Aden Gallery, an influential private gallery located in Washington, D.C., and among the first with an integrated stable of artists and patrons.

An innovative collaboration between VMFA and VCU’s Museum Studies graduate program, this student-organized exhibition features more than 50 works by 23 renowned and lesser known African American artists once associated with the pioneering Barnett Aden Gallery (1943 – 1969). A cross-section of art by the internationally acclaimed Elizabeth Catlett forms the core of the exhibition.

This special installation highlights an important recent acquisition of American art—Jacob Lawrence’s The Legend of John Brown graphic series. Consisting of twenty-two silk-screen prints, the portfolio is based on Lawrence’s same-size gouache paintings from 1941 (owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts) that explore the life of the controversial abolitionist. In 1977, when the paintings had become too fragile for public display and access, the Detroit museum commissioned Lawrence to reproduce them as limited-edition screen-prints. Each painting was originally displayed with the artist’s accompanying text, which builds on the powerful visual narrative.

Lawrence’s John Brown series was among the historical epics he produced in the 1930s and 1940s focusing on heroic 19th-century figures like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass as well as the Great Migration of the early 20th-century. As Lawrence explained: “The inspiration to paint the Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown series was motivated by historical events as told to us by the adults of our community . . . the black community. The relating of these events, for many of us, was not only very informative but also most exciting to us, the men and women of these stories were strong, daring and heroic; and therefore we could and did relate to these by means of poetry, song and paint.” It is for these powerful narratives that Lawrence continues to be most celebrated today.

The first exhibition to explore the extraordinarily rich visual culture of India’s last royal families, Maharaja: The Splendors of India’s Great Kings spans the period from the early 18th century to the mid-20th century, bringing together over 200 magnificent objects. It examines the changing role of the maharajas (“great kings”) within a social and historical context, and reveals how their patronage of the arts, both in India and Europe, resulted in splendid and beautiful objects symbolic of royal status, power and identity.

The power of an Indian king was expressed most spectacularly in the grand public processions that celebrated royal events and religious festivities. Riding a richly ornamented elephant or horse, the ruler was lavishly dressed and jeweled, and surrounded by attendants bearing symbolic attributes of kingship: a royal parasol, fans and staffs of authority. These traditional royal elements mingle with more modern riches, including spectacular commissions from Europe’s most elegant fashion houses, as the exhibition traces the fascinating history of the shifting power between India’s dynasties, the rise of British colonial supremacy, and the move toward Indian independence.

The exhibition is organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and is organized for VMFA by John Henry Rice, Associate Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art.

Maharaja: The Splendors of India’s Great Kings has traveled to select cities outside of London, including Munich, Toronto, and San Francisco. VMFA will be the only east-coast opportunity to view this stunning collection of jewels, armor, decorative arts, paintings and other luxurious royal possessions.

Timed to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Emancipation, VMFA is reprising the exhibition Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era, originally organized by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.

The Richmond reworking of this thought-provoking exhibition, which takes its title from Whitman’s poem “As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Wood,” showcases one of VMFA’s seminal works—Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862—in addition to 29 paintings, sculpture, and rare books from noted public and private collections across the country.

While preserving the central focus of the original exhibition—the layered meanings and moods of 1860s American art as viewed against the poetry of Walt Whitman, one of America’s chief “scribes” of the war—VMFA’s reprise expands the number of featured artists.

By juxtaposing the writings of Whitman with various landscapes and genre scenes by Conrad Wise Chapman, Frederic Church, Robert Duncanson, David Johnson, Winslow Homer, among others, the exhibition encourages a fresh understanding of America’s visual and verbal responses to the national crisis. A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Dixon, accompanies the exhibition.

This summer, VMFA will display the top 10 Doodles from young artists in Virginia in our MeadWestvaco Art Education Center. One student artist from each state is competing in Google’s Doodle 4 Google contest to win a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for their school.

You’ll be able to vote for your favorite Doodle at http://goo.gl/RcJvF, May 2 – May 10. To ensure the Virginia Doodler becomes the National Winner, be sure to vote today!

The winning Doodle will be displayed on Google’s home page on May 18, 2012.

Many people consider Paris the “cradle of street photography,” a reference to an approach that, loosely defined, focuses on spontaneous images of daily life in urban areas. This exhibition looks at the work of three photographers—each roughly a generation younger than the next—who worked within this tradition while developing their own distinct visions: Robert Doisneau (French, 1912–1994), Édouard Boubat (French, 1923–1999), and Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938). Although these photographers traveled throughout the world, this exhibition features their images of France —primarily those of Paris—as an homage to street photography.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Paris, Robert Doisneau photographed aspects of the city he knew best and captured what he considered a vanishing way of life. After a few international assignments early in his career, he declined an invitation to join the prestigious international photography cooperative Magnum, explaining that when he worked in other countries, his subjects inevitably looked too exotic. Instead, he chose to emphasize his own local knowledge. “I am part of the environment of Paris. I can be seen with my old cap pressed down around my ears when it’s cold. I am part of the setting. I know it.” Out of this rootedness in one community, he shaped an artistic philosophy that treated the city as a series of cinematic sets:

Often, you find a scene, a scene that is already evoking something—either stupidity, or pretentiousness, or, perhaps, charm. So you have a little theatre. Well, all you have to do is wait there in front of this little theatre for the actors to present themselves. I can stay half a day in the same place. And it’s very rare that I come home with a completely empty bag. (Dialogue with Photography, 1992)

The humor that frequently emerges from Doisneau’s images attests to his familiarity with his environment as well as to his ability to communicate a compelling narrative in a single frame.

Less well known than Doisneau, Édouard Boubat also spent the majority of his life in Paris and was part of the same milieu. Boubat subscribed to a more romanticized notion of chance, describing his approach as reliant on his awareness that a singular photographic moment awaited him. In 1988 he discussed his most famous photograph, The Little Girl with Dead Leaves, which is featured in this exhibition:

One fall morning after the war, I am walking through the Luxembourg Gardens, I meet “The Little Girl with Dead Leaves”; she is there for herself and for me: my first picture awaits me. If I were to go through those gardens year after year I would never meet her again. (Édouard Boubat: Pauses, 1988)

Boubat prided himself on his ability to capture his final image after taking very few pictures (and often just one).

Joel Meyerowitz began photographing American cities in the 1960s alongside Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Openly indebted to Robert Frank’s influential The Americans—a gritty portrayal of 1950s America—Meyerowitz also aimed for a certain “toughness” in his images. “Something that came from your gut, out of instinct, raw, of the moment, something that couldn’t be described in any other way.” (Bystander: A History of Street Photography, 1994).

When he turned his camera on the streets of Paris in 1983, Meyerowitz signaled his awareness of the legacy of Doisneau and Boubat, as well the work of two other French photographers who influenced them—Eugène Atget (1857–1927) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). His use of color adds another layer to this photographic tradition, while it also marks a transition to a younger generation.

Flower and fine art combine for a dazzling exhibition of beauty and creativity. Members from more than 75 garden clubs across Virginia interpret masterworks in the collection of VMFA with floral arrangements throughout the galleries.

Fine Arts & Flowers: 2012 Presented by The Council of VMFA.

Floral designs contributed by members of the Garden Club of Virginia, Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, and Garden Clubs of Virginia.

Exhibition DVD
Purchase the Fine Arts & Flowers DVD online!

Official supplier of flowers and plant material:

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Special Thanks
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Al-Hadid makes complex sculptures that seem in a state of flux, suggesting both incompletion and decay. Underlying her large-scale, baroque forms are a wide array of influences, including ancient Biblical and mythological narratives, Arab oral traditions, Gothic church construction, Western painting, Islamic ornamentation, and scientific advances in physics and astronomy. The exhibition features a single new monumental sculpture—Trace of a Fictional Third—that interweaves landscape, architecture, and the human figure. It is accompanied by a selection of new, heavily worked graphite drawings that shed light on Al-Hadid’s creative process. Al-Hadid received her MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and currently lives and works in New York.

Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981 and moved to the United States as a child. She studied sculpture and art history at Kent State University in Ohio (BA and BFA, 2003), and earned her MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond (2005). Her work has gained international attention, including recent solo exhibitions at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Murcia, Spain; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in New York.

Al-Hadid’s work is characterized by ambitious scale and complexity both based on a wide range of intellectual and personal sources. She uses everyday materials such as cardboard, plaster, plywood, and resin, pushing the limits of their physical properties to create a sense of precarious balance and impending collapse. Her works often refer to recognizable architectural components—towers, cathedral spires, labyrinths, and classical columns—while also incorporating elements of nature and the human form.

Balancing the monumentality of Al-Hadid’s sculptures is a quality of light that seems to animate and deconstruct them. While she leaves behind the folkloric, mythological, and historical narratives that inspired previous works, Trace of a Fictional Third continues her interest in themes of time and motion. Cascades convey liquidity; undulating fabrics merge with more solid structures. And examples of the human figure, more overt than in prior work, are both voluptuously corporeal and spectral.

Diana Al-Hadid: Trace of a Fictional Third is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The sculpture is on loan courtesy of the George Economou Collection. The exhibition received support from the Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.