Celebrate this groundbreaking, internationally renowned photographer and painter whose remarkable Richmond-based career spans over six decades. Presenting 63 photographs and 9 paintings by the Richmond native, born in 1924, this is the first major exhibition to explore the trajectory of her impressive 60-year career. From playful and irreverent scenes of everyday life to ethereal evocations of the past, Willie Anne Wright’s experimental paintings and photographs examine pop-culture, feminine identity, the pull of history and the shifting cultural landscape of the South. With a focus on photography’s role in shaping collective understandings of history, place, and gender, the exhibition draws from VMFA’s recent acquisition of Wright’s work, including more than 230 photographs and 10 paintings, as well as a comprehensive artist archive.

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center.

Exhibition Highlights

William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust

The Chrisman Family Foundation
Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner

William and Lilli Beyer
Nancy and Wayne Chasen
Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc.
Mr. James. W. Klaus
Teri Craig Miles
Patsy K. Pettus
VMFA Council Exhibition Fund

VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:

Page and Sandy Bond | Laura and Stephen Holdych | Candace H. Osdene | Lewis and Tina Stoneburner | Adele and Robert Van Divender, in memoriam | Deborah and Mark Wlaz

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

This list reflects sponsors as of August 23, 2023.

Anne S at Jack B’s Pool (Back), 1984, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), silver dye bleach print, 11 x 14 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.302

Picture Windows: Photographs from the Collection showcases 18 photographs from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition explores the window as subject and device in 20th-cenutry photographs. Featured photographers include Imogen Cunningham, Lee Friedlander, O. Winston Link, Gordon Parks, John Pfahl, Ming Smith, Danny Lyon,Minor White, Garry Winogrand, Justin Kimball, Gordon Lee Bennett, Wynn Bullock, John Divola, Aaron Siskind, Alen MacWeeney, Mary Eleanor Browning, Morris Engel, and Joseph Breitenbach.   

The rich variety of pictures on view illustrates how each artist explores the same architectural feature in distinct ways. These poetic, quiet, and luminous photographs of windows contemplate the use of formal devices to create metaphors, shape experiences, and enlarge our understanding of the world. 

Picture Windows: Photographs from the Collection is curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper.

ABOVE Self Portrait on Geary Street, 1958, Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883–1976), gelatin silver print, printed later. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Christopher English and Meda Lane in memory of Harold and Elizabeth English, 2017.498

TOP OF PAGE 300 W. 23rd Street, New York, New York, 1978, from the series Picture Window, John Pfahl (American, 1939–2020), chromogenic print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Kent and Marcia Minichiello, 2022.734 

In Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents a suite of 31 works—in watercolor, pencil, ink, crayon, and collage—that the artist completed in 1956 and gathered in a portfolio titled Drawings from Africa. 

Born in Cairo, Illinois, Theadore “Ted” Joans was an unlikely icon of the art world. An African American visual artist, poet, and jazz musician, Joans found a prominent space among the surrealist painters, beat poets, and avant-garde musicians of the era. Joans was a modern renaissance man who, upon his departure from Chicago, took residence in New York and Timbuktu, located in Northern Mali on the upper west coast of Africa. For nearly three decades, Joans kept a home in Timbuktu and traveled extensively throughout Africa creating a visual diary of his encounters. 

The works of art featured in this exhibition were a gift to VMFA from author, scholar, and longtime Virginia Commonwealth University art history professor Dr. Regenia Perry. The exhibition also features select ephemera such as an artist’s book and examples of Joans’s poetry. 

Portraits figure prominently in this exhibition as Joans focused his gaze on the people he encountered on his travels. His subjects’ eyes meet the viewer’s or turn away. Joans’s images are vibrant full-length or half-length portraits that depict individuals in a range of traditional and contemporary African styles of dress. Also included are renderings of masks and classical African sculptural figures. 

Visitors will experience a visual antecedent to Joans’s poem “Africa,” which includes the following lines: “Land of my mothers, where a black god made me/ My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be.” 

Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri was curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

For an online presentation of this exhibition, visit Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri in our Collection Stories.

TOP IMAGE Drawings from Africa, 1956, Ted Joans (American, 1928–2003), watercolor and pencil on board. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Regenia Perry, 2020.366a-b

ABOVE LEFT Untitled, from the series Drawings from Africa, 1956, Ted Joans (American, 1928–2003), watercolor and pencil on board. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Regenia Perry, 2020.389

ABOVE RIGHT Untitled, from the series Drawings from Africa, 1956, Ted Joans (American, 1928–2003), watercolor and pencil on board. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Dr. Regenia Perry, 2020.394

The Impressionists, and later the Postimpressionists, were both lauded and criticized for their revolutionary painting techniques, yet these artists were equally groundbreaking in their radical drawing practices. Experimental Lines: Impressionist and Postimpressionist Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon explores this revolutionary graphic innovation.  

The exhibition begins with early 19th-century works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and others who laid the foundation against which the Impressionists reacted. On April 15, 1874, an exhibition by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers, etc., opened in Paris. This landmark event would become known as the First Impressionist Exhibition and introduced artists such as Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro to broad audiences. 

Drawings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and their colleagues highlight quintessential Impressionist subjects, including the landscape, modern life, and the racetrack, to consider the ways that artists working in France during the second half of the 19th century used drawing to articulate a new approach to depicting their environment.  

Drawing provided an opportunity to push the boundaries of traditional composition and use of color as well as to record ephemeral conditions of the landscape and scenes of modern life—concepts for which their paintings are well known, but which would not have been possible without these experiments on paper. In a rarely seen early drawing by Vincent van Gogh, the artist uses a series of repetitive marks and cross-hatching to suggest the effects of a gentle breeze on the marshy landscape near the Dutch village of Etten. These emotive lines prefigure the expressionism of Van Gogh’s later works.  

Incorporating works in graphite, ink, pastel, and watercolor, the drawings in this exhibition range from quick sketches and preparatory images to finished, stand-alone compositions, which all present the innovative role drawing played in the Impressionist artistic process.  

This installation was curated by VMFA’s Theresa A. Cunningham, PhD, Assistant Curator of European Art and the Mellon Collections. For an online presentation of this exhibition, visit Experimental Lines: Impressionist and Postimpressionist Drawings in our Collection Stories.

The Harbor at Cherbourg, 1871 (Le Port de Lorient), 1871, Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895), pencil and watercolor. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 2012.66 

Marsh with Water Lilies, Etten (detail), 1881, Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, active in France, 1853–1890), pen and India ink on wove paper with graphite underdrawing. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Paul Mellon, 85.777 

In this exhibition, Indian music and paintings fill two of VMFA’s South Asian Art Galleries. The paintings come from ragamalas, sets of pictures that depict musical structures called ragas. Each musical structure has a characteristic progression of notes intended—as the Sanskrit word raga suggests—to “color” the mind and stimulate a distinct emotional response.

Ragamala paintings, in which these musical moods are personified as heroes and heroines in romantic or devotional settings, are organized into groups imagined as families. Typically, a full ragamala series presents a grand cycle of six such families, each associated with one of India’s six seasons.

Various aspects of this multisensory art form are explored in the galleries through 46 paintings and 15 ragas played through loudspeakers. A dozen of the paintings are recent acquisitions being shown for the very first time, and another 20 are new gifts to the collection.

Khambhavati Ragini, mid-17th century, Rajasthan, Bikaner, opaque watercolor on paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2018.193

Megha Raga, ca. 1730–40, Punjab Hills, Bilaspur, opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2017.24

TOP OF PAGE Vibhasa Ragini (detail), ca. 1720–30, Rajasthan, Bundi, opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, 2016.236

MFA presents this stunning collection of art loaned by philanthropists Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III. More than 80 works, spanning the 16th through early 19th centuries, include paintings by “Old World masters” such as Jan Bruegel the Younger, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Peter Paul Rubens, Hubert Robert, Pierre-Jacques Volaire, and others. The collection features paintings and decorative art objects from the Baroque and Rococo periods.

Dr. Sylvain Cordier, VMFA’s Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art, has curated the presentation of the collection in the spirit of an enfilade—an architectural term that describes a series of rooms aligned in a row in traditional aristocratic palaces. Visitors have the opportunity to experience the exquisite artworks in the lavish context of an 18th-century princely apartment where they are invited to travel through space and time and stimulate thoughts and conversations about science, philosophy, history, and spirituality.

Presented in a series of galleries on Level 2, off of the Great Hall, the works of art on view include religious and mythological figures, landscapes and still lifes, East Asian inspirations on European Rococo artists, and compositions from the Grand Tour. Throughout these galleries, Cordier has selected a limited number of works from the VMFA collection to dialogue with and highlight the paintings and decorative art objects from the Saunders collection.

Exhibition Highlights

VMFA is pleased to present artworks by participants in our Summer Art Adventures program for ages 5–12. Each work was selected based on the students’ enthusiasm, creativity, and artistic process. This collection represents the culmination of weeks of exploration, experimentation, and artistic expression.

Throughout the summer, students were encouraged to explore various media, techniques, and styles while learning about and being inspired by VMFA’s diverse collection. Professional artists and educators also worked with students to integrate math, science, language, history, and technology as they correlate with the Virginia Standards of Learning objectives, fostering a holistic approach to education. Through engagement with instructors and interactions with peers, these young artists cultivated not only their technical skills and artistic voice but also their creativity, critical thinking, and confidence.

Each piece tells a unique story, offering a glimpse into the minds and hearts of these budding artists. We hope you enjoy this showcase of the accomplishments and talent of VMFA’s skilled students!

To find out more information about Youth & Family Studio programs, please visit the VMFA Youth Studio.

This exhibition features designer renderings and garments created by fifty-seven Virginia students in grades six through twelve who participated in the Teen Stylin’: Mementos runway show, held May 5, 2024.

The theme Mementos inspired students to explore the memories that objects carry. This includes objects that we personally inherit and hold onto as well as the objects in the museum’s collection.

The garments on view include winners in the following categories: Best in Show, Best Use of Materials, Most Creative Construction, Best Interpretation of a Work of Art, Best Interpretation of the Theme, and Most Wearable.

Held annually, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Teen Stylin’ program challenges students with a passion for clothing design, studio arts, installation art, and creative construction to make a unique, wearable work of art. Participants work for twelve weeks, from February to May, with local fashion designers and studio art instructors to construct garments inspired by objects from the VMFA collection. Students may participate during on-campus weekly workshops or as part of the independent study program. Teen Stylin’ culminates with a runway exhibition featuring students’ designs.

Visit VMFA’s website to learn more about teen programs at the museum: www.vmfa.museum/teens/

Sponsored by

Two artists. Two exhibitions. One Ticket. Your ticket includes access to both Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village and Whitfield Lovell: Passages.

Explore the life and legacy of Richmond native Benjamin Wigfall (1930–2017)—artist, educator, and champion of arts equity. In this first retrospective of his pioneering career, the exhibition highlights the period from his early years in Virginia in the 1950s to his founding of Communications Village, a community art space in Kingston, New York, in the 1970s. Learn about his Richmond roots in the Church Hill neighborhood, his stellar artistic achievements, and his lifelong commitment to building community. Through nearly 50 works of art by Wigfall, numerous video recordings, and a printmaking display, visitors will experience an intimate portrait of his artwork, impact, and legacy.

Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village showcases Wigfall’s artistic development, from abstract painting, to printmaking, to his pioneering work in social-practice art and his founding of Communications Village. He was a VMFA Fellowship recipient who art educators and museum leaders regarded highly for his artistry and personal character. Wigfall was also the youngest artist to have his work acquired by VMFA. From Richmond, where his passion for artmaking began, to his pursuit of higher education at Hampton University and Yale, to his professorship at State University of New York (SUNY), New Paltz, Wigfall recognized inequities and dedicated his life to providing access and opportunity.

While teaching at SUNY, New Paltz, he selected a close-knit Black neighborhood in nearby Kingston for the location of his studio because it reminded him of Church Hill. Named Communications Village, his studio became a place for making art and mentoring youth. In this inclusive, vibrant setting, Wigfall invited leading African American artists of the era to engage with the local community and to experiment with printmaking as an art form. Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village traces Wigfall’s development as an artist and showcases Communications Village as a major conceptual artwork within his larger body of paintings, assemblages, and prints. The exhibition also features more than 30 major works by Benny Andrews, Betty Blayton, Melvin Edwards, Charles Gaines, Mavis Pusey, and others affiliated with Communications Village.

Exhibition Highlights

Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village is organized by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition at VMFA is curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner
Julia Louise Reynolds Fund

Bank of America

Birch Douglass
Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund
The Francena T. Harrison Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. R. Augustus Edwards III
The Doris Glisson Memorial Fund
Alexandria Rogers McGrath
Richmond (VA) Chapter, The Links, Incorporated
VMFA Council Exhibition Fund

VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:

Van Baskins and Marc Purintun | Anne Battle and Leonard Slater | Susan L. Buck in memory of Ed Chappell | Drs. Betty Neal Crutcher and Ronald A. Crutcher | Molly Dodge | Sally and Mike Hunnicutt | Michelle and John Nestler | Paula Saylor-Robinson and Danny Robinson | Paul and Nancy Springman | Stephen L. and Harriet Heldenfels Yake | Sam and Nikki Young

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

This list represents sponsors as of April 17, 2023.

Mesmerizing and evocative, these 42 photographs and two film installations by contemporary American artist Dawoud Bey contemplate the harrowing journeys and human realities of the Virginia slave trail, Louisiana plantations, and Ohio’s Underground Railroad. Dawoud Bey: Elegy premieres a trilogy that includes Bey’s most recent series of never-before-seen photographs taken in Richmond and commissioned by VMFA. Internationally renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Bey, in these landscapes, meditates on place as profound repository of memory and witness to American history. In this immersive and transportive exhibition, his works poetically imply a human presence, deepening our understanding of African American experiences rarely represented in collective US history.

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Dawoud Bey: Elegy showcases three photographic series. Visitors will first encounter Stony the Road, commissioned by VMFA, which takes viewers to the historic trail in Richmond, Virginia, where Africans arrived in bondage to an unknown land and were walked into enslavement. The photographs in In This Here Place contemplate the plantations of Louisiana and the toils and horrors of enslavement. Photographed in Ohio, Night Coming Tenderly, Black elucidates our understanding of the Underground Railroad and the perilous flight to self-emancipation.

The first film installation, 350,000, evokes the 350,000+ men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks at Manchester Docks between 1830 and 1860. The film’s soundtrack features Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod, VCU professor of dance. Visitors will also experience Evergreen, a three-channel film installation created in collaboration with composer and experimental ethnographer Imani Uzuri, whose multilayered vocal score adds a haunting soundscape.

The Artist: “Dawoud Bey: Elegy”

“The reason that I make the work that I do is to provoke a conversation about the past in the present moment.” Watch artist Dawoud Bey discuss the “enveloping” experience he has created through his photography and film installations on view in VMFA’s immersive exhibition “Dawoud Bey: Elegy.”

Shop Dawoud Bey: Elegy merchandise and more from Dawoud Bey at VMFA Shop.

Exhibition Highlights

Presented by

Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment
William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust
Julia Louise Reynolds Fund

Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner
Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund

Nancy and Wayne Chasen

Anne and Gus Edwards
Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada

VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:
Liz and Bob Blue | Caprice Bragg and Larry Thomas | Kate and Matt Cooper | Dana Foundation, Inc. | Marietta Daniel | Dr. Monroe E. Harris, Jr. and Dr. Jill Bussey Harris | Eucharia “Ukay” and Richard Jackson, M.D. | Tammy and Brian Jackson | Arnel Manalo | Michelle and John Nestler | Irvin and Linda Seeman

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Irrigation Ditch, 2019, Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), gelatin silver print, 48 x 59 in. Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Image © Dawoud Bey

Two artists. Two exhibitions. One Ticket. Your ticket includes access to both Whitfield Lovell: Passages and Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village.

Be transported by Whitfield Lovell’s evocative multisensory installations, conté drawings, and assemblages. Whitfield Lovell: Passages is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of this renowned contemporary artist’s works, which contemplate the ordinary lives and extraordinary journeys of the African American experience while raising universal questions about identity, memory, and America’s collective heritage.

Born in The Bronx, Lovell, a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship recipient and conceptual artist, creates exquisite drawings inspired by photographs of unidentified African Americans taken between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement. He creates assemblages by pairing his drawings (on paper or on salvaged wooden boards) with found objects. He incorporates those assemblages into his installations or presents them as enigmatic stand-alone tableaux that are rich with symbolism and ambiguity. Two immersive installations, Deep River and Visitation: The Richmond Project, begin and end the exhibition experience respectively. Also on view are his acclaimed Kin series, as well as his more recent works, The Reds series and Card Pieces series.

Lovell’s immersive, multisensory installation Deep River (2013) is a monumental work that features video projections, sound, and everyday objects. Documenting the perilous journey freedom seekers took by crossing the Tennessee River during the Civil War, Deep River addresses that struggle for freedom and its inherent themes of abandonment, death, life, and hope. However, Lovell invites viewers to contemplate the larger human quest for equality and the pursuit of a better life—themes that transcend time and geography.

Visitation: The Richmond Project appears at the end of the exhibition and is a profound homage to Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood. The installation includes locally sourced objects that the artist collected with Virginia Commonwealth University students in 2001. Lovell pays tribute to the lives, names, and faces that were the people of Jackson Ward, giving the country’s first major African American entrepreneurial community its rightful place in the history of America.

Exhibition Highlights

Whitfield Lovell: Passages is organized by the American Federation of Arts in collaboration with Whitfield Lovell. Major support for the national tour and exhibition catalogue are provided by National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition is organized for VMFA by Alexis Assam, Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art.

Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner
Julia Louise Reynolds Fund

Bank of America

Birch Douglass
Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund
The Francena T. Harrison Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. R. Augustus Edwards III
The Doris Glisson Memorial Fund
Alexandria Rogers McGrath
Richmond (VA) Chapter, The Links, Incorporated
VMFA Council Exhibition Fund

VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:

Van Baskins and Marc Purintun | Anne Battle and Leonard Slater | Susan L. Buck in memory of Ed Chappell | Drs. Betty Neal Crutcher and Ronald A. Crutcher | Molly Dodge | Sally and Mike Hunnicutt | Michelle and John Nestler | Paula Saylor-Robinson and Danny Robinson | Paul and Nancy Springman | Stephen L. and Harriet Heldenfels Yake | Sam and Nikki Young

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

This list represents sponsors as of April 17, 2023.

In this installation of monumental works on paper, Athena LaTocha invites viewers to meditate on the landscape as a geographic space, a repository of history, and a personified living entity. Her works often incorporate materials and elements taken from sites referenced in their titles. These sites are layered with history that underpins their vibrant and visceral presence.

LaTocha was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She is of mixed heritage—her father is of Polish and Austrian descent and her mother is of Ojibwe and Hunkpapa Lakota ancestry. Driven by her deep love of nature and the land, LaTocha explores the relationship between landscapes and the human histories that were made there. The three works presented in this exhibition reference the landscapes of Louisiana and New York. In extracting materials from each site for use in the paintings, LaTocha draws attention to the physical and cultural scars that are incised into the earth through industry, habitation, and traumatic events that underscore the ongoing unrest within the social and political landscape.

Exhibition Highlights

This installation is curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Bulbancha (Green Silence) (detail), 2019, Athena LaTocha (American, born 1969), ink, Mississippi River mud, and Spanish moss on paper, 132 x 204 in. © Athena LaTocha