This selection from VMFA’s collection of Art Nouveau posters highlights the late 19th-century design style, which emphasized beauty in natural forms and movement and was often expressed through flowing, stylized lines and flourishing patterns. The French, Belgian, Viennese, and American posters on view include works designed by Alphonse Mucha, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri de Toulouse-Latrec, Manual Orazi, Josef Maria Auchentaller, and others.

Art Nouveau posters pushed the preconceived notions of “fine art” and merged the gap between academic art and applied arts, and the poster craze spread from Europe to America. Advertising everything from theatrical revues and products to newspapers and literary journals, posters also served as agents of social change, depicting new images of women as fashionable and independent people. While their styles of Art Nouveau vary greatly, this exhibition’s posters and their subjects offer a glimpse into societal interests during the late 1800s.

Posters gave artists the opportunity to disseminate their work to far-reaching audiences and build large followings that included art collectors. With the advent of new industrial printing technology, these commercial artworks were rapidly mass-produced and disseminated throughout cities, turning average urban streets into colorful landscapes, and the style associated with Art Nouveau posters laid the foundation for modern and contemporary graphics.

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Exhibition Highlights

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This exhibition, which includes new posters acquired with funds provided by Maria and John Shugars, is co-curated by Barry Shifman, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Decorative Arts 1890—present, and Curatorial Assistant Madeleine Dugan.

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The Modern House (La Maison Moderne), 1900, Manuel Orazi, (Italian, active in France, 1860–1934); printed by Affiches Artistiques, J. Minot, French (Paris), active late 19th century, lithograph. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund

Face and Figure brings together a selection of portrait-based photographs acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since 2020. The installation includes formal and vernacular studio works, powerful documentary projects, intimate studies of loved ones, and conceptual projects that stretch the de­finition of the genre.

Since the advent of the medium in the 1830s, photography has been dominated by pictures of people. Photographic portraits, whether made by a professional, a family member, an automated photo booth, or the cell phone in your pocket, reveal both how people present themselves to the world and how they see and understand themselves and others. Far more than a simple record of physiognomy, photographic portraits can memorialize loved ones, celebrate individual achievement, probe personal psychology, explore the social context of being, or interrogate how identity, history, and culture shape the self.

Together, the works on view—16 photographs, plus 22 photo-booth portraits, two portraits in brooches, and one photo card—demonstrate the range and vitality of the photographic medium and its capacity to express and explore the human condition.

Exhibition Highlights

Born Antoine Charles Horace Vernet in Bordeaux, France, Carle Vernet was a painter, engraver, and lithographer trained in the style of the Neoclassical school. In addition to working alongside his father, Joseph Vernet (1714–1789)—one of the foremost French artists of the 18th century—Carle trained with Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié (1735–1784), a well-established painter of history subjects and genre scenes. Vernet was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1782 and he attended the Royal Academy of France in Rome. He seemed destined for a career as an official royal painter, but after the French Revolution and the fall of the monarchy, he turned to engraving and lithography to appeal to a new clientele of bourgeois art enthusiasts.

His elaborate battle scenes glorifying Napoleon’s campaigns appealed to the emperor who awarded him the Legion of Honor. Vernet remained one of the principal French painters among leading political figures, earning widespread respect for his hunting and horse racing scenes as well as his depictions of military and court life. Today, he is best known for his representations of horses and equine activities that portray the animal in a lively and witty manner. His paintings emphasize the horse’s central role in French society at that time, often capturing the dynamism of the relationship between the animal and its handler.

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Exhibition Highlights

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This installation is curated by Dr. Sylvain Cordier, VMFA’s Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art.

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Hussar Standing Beside His Charger (detail), ca. 1812, Carle Vernet (French, 1758–1836), pen and ink with wash on laid paper with a watermark. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 85.817

Carabinier-à-Cheval (detail), ca. 1810, Carle Vernet (French, 1758–1836), graphite on wove paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Ritzenberg, 97.204

Ito Shinsui was a pioneer of modern Japanese prints known as shin-hanga (new prints), a traditional woodblock printmaking technique that emphasized collaboration between the artist, publisher, block carver, and printer.

Born in Tokyo, Ito Shinsui began apprenticing with printmaking master Kaburagi Kiyokata at age 13. In 1915, Shinsui designed one of the first shin-hanga prints, and three years later, he created Eight Views of Omi, which was produced by the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. Known for its natural wonders, temples, and shrines, Omi is an ancient Japanese province situated around Lake Biwa near Kyoto. Since the Heian period, Omi had attracted emperors, imperial families, and noblemen for retreat and exile from the outside world.

This installation displays the complete set of Shinsui’s Eight Views of Omi, alongside some of his other works, which were donated to VMFA by Patrons René and Carolyn Balcer. The Balcers are the generous donors of VMFA’s hundreds of prints by Kawase Hasui, another leading artist of shin-hanga in the first half of the 20th century.

For an online presentation of this exhibition please visit the Eight Views of Omi: Japanese Woodblock Prints by Ito Shinsui Collection Story.

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Exhibition Highlights

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Katahashi Bridge at Seta, from the series Eight Views of Omi, 1918, Ito Shinsui (Japanese, 1898–1972), woodblock print, ink and color on paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, René and Carolyn Balcer Collection, 2020.272

Explore the guitar as visual subject, enduring symbol, and storyteller’s companion. Strummed everywhere from parlors and front porches to protest rallies and rock arenas—the guitar also appears far and wide in American art. Its depictions enable artists and their human subjects to address topics that otherwise go untold or under-told. Experience paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and music in a multimedia presentation that unpacks the guitar’s cultural significance, illuminating matters of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and identity.

Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art is the first exhibition to explore the instrument’s symbolism in American art from the early 19th century to the present day. Featuring 125 works of art, as well as 35 musical instruments, the exhibition demonstrates that guitars figure prominently in the visual stories Americans tell themselves about themselves—their histories, identities, and aspirations. The guitar—portable, affordable, and ubiquitous—appears in American art more than any other instrument, and this exhibition explores those depictions as well as the human ambitions, intentions, and connections facilitated by the instrument—a powerful tool and elastic emblem. 

The works in Storied Strings are divided into nine sections: Aestheticizing a Motif; Cold Hard Cash; Hispanicization; Parlor Games; Personification; Picturing Performance; Political Guitars; the Guitar in Black Art and Culture; Re-Gendered Instruments. The exhibition also features smaller thematically arranged niche spaces, including The Blues; Women in Early Country Music; the Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll; Hawaii-ana; and Cowboy Guitars. 

The accompanying 300-page catalogue positions the guitar within a nexus of art, music, literary, and cultural histories. After its run at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art will travel to Nashville where it will be on view at the  Frist Art Museum, May 26–August 13, 2023.

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Exhibition Highlights

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Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Leo Mazow, VMFA’s Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art.

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The Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Center for American Art
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment
Julia Louise Reynolds Fund

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Nancy and Wayne Chasen
Community Foundation for a greater Richmond
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner
Troutman Pepper
YouDecide

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Robert Lehman Foundation
Peachtree House Foundation

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Birch Douglass
Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc.
An Anonymous Donor

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VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:

Fralin Pickups, LLC | Dr. and Mrs. Michael Godin | Sherrie Page Guyer and Raymond A. Guyer III | Karen and Pat Kelly | Curry and Lindsey Motley | Pamela and Fred Palmore | Dr. and Mrs. R. P. Sowers III | Tredway S. Spratley and Janine M. Collins | Don and Pia Steinbrugge | Courtenay S. Welton II

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Generous support for the exhibition catalogue provided by

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

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This list represents sponsors as of September 27, 2022.

Experience the visuals, sound, and emotion in a large-scale video installation created by Jamaican-born artist Ebony Patterson. Shown slowly in reverse, Patterson’s film portrays a trilogy of three men, each on a separate screen, dressing themselves while tears quietly roll down their cheeks. Like the triptych paintings often found on the altar pieces at the front of churches built during the Renaissance, these figures occupy a chapel-like space where viewers can sit and contemplate their presence. The voice of a young boy reading the poem “If We Must Die,” by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, frames the scene. McKay wrote his poem, published in 1919, following weeks of race riots dubbed “the Red Summer,” in which hundreds of African Americans were killed during attacks on Black communities in several cities across America. One hundred years later, Patterson reiterates McKay’s words as a soundtrack to her visually arresting work, exposing the continued vulnerability of Black bodies in our present society.

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… three kings weep …, 2018, Ebony Patterson (Jamaican, born 1981), three channel digital color video installation with sound, 8 minutes 34 seconds. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund, 2019.240

Featuring more than two dozen works on paper by the important Fauvist painter and quintessential artist of vibrant outdoor social events, this delightful assembly of drawings by Raoul Dufy charmingly conveys the pomp and elegance of the golden era of British horse racing.

Dufy was drawn to the alluring spectacle of the crowd at Ascot and spent two days in June 1930 observing the throng of upper-class people gathered there, tracing their contours and movements with his distinctively sinuous and gestural lines to produce sketches commemorating the event. He later used these sketches as the basis for more detailed watercolors that are also included in this exhibition. Drawn from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, these works depict the sport that captivated Mellon during his studies at the University of Cambridge and remained a lifelong passion.

This exhibition is curated by Dr. Colleen Yarger, VMFA’s former assistant curator for European Art and the Mellon Collections, under the direction of Dr. Sylvain Cordier, Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art.

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IMAGES Ascot (detail), 1930s, Raoul Dufy (French, 1877–1953), transparent and opaque watercolor with graphite on wove paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 85.764; Page from a Sketchbook (detail), “Impressions at Ascot,” 1930, Raoul Dufy (French, 1877–1953), graphite on wove paper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 85.763.18

Featuring 10 works by contemporary Native American artists, this exhibition underscores the richness and diversity of the contemporary Indigenous experience told through the medium of printmaking.

The works—nine prints and one printed-paper woven basket—are linked by the belief that words have immeasurable power, particularly when reckoning with how written language has been weaponized against Indigenous people throughout the history of the Americas.

Words Matter introduces several contemporary Native American artists who have worked in the medium of printmaking, including Shan Goshorn (Cherokee), Rick Bartow (Wiyot), Demian Diné Yazhi (Diné/Navajo), Marie Watt (Seneca), Larry McNeil (Tlingit), and others. All artists represented in the exhibition have chosen to incorporate text into their images, using the language of the colonizers of their land to tell their own stories. In this way, words play a powerful role in reclaiming a lost history and adding to the incomplete American narrative. In doing so, they also offer messages of hope, humor, and resilience.

Words Matter is curated by Dr. Johanna Minich, Assistant Curator of Native American Art.

Accompanying the Words Matter print exhibition is a display of Indigenous comic book artists, writers, and illustrators titled Untold History. To learn more about both exhibitions please see the Words Matter & Untold History story.

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IMAGES Native Epistemology (detail), 2004, Larry McNeil (Tlingit, born 1955), lithograph. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Funds provided by Margaret A. and C. Boyd Clarke and Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund; Shrouded in Grey (detail), 2015, Shan Goshorn (Cherokee, 1957-2018), arches paper, ink, artificial sinew, copper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Funds provided by Margaret A. and C. Boyd Clarke and Mareke Schiller

VMFA is pleased to present works of art selected from our Early Childhood Education programs. Each work on display was created in one of our many programs designed to reach children ages three months to five years. These works demonstrate the diverse experiences our youngest audiences gain through these exciting and popular programs.

VMFA’s Early Childhood Education programs connect early learning to the museum’s world-renowned collection. Students enjoy play, music, and movement activities, gallery walks, and multisensory art projects. While building self-awareness and social skills, diverse subjects are explored, including world cultures, science, literature, and mathematics.

Explore the captivating paintings and sculptures of Nepalese-born Tibetan American artist Tsherin Sherpa. This thought-provoking, participatory art experience is presented in the form of a narrative telling a story of loss, struggle, and re-empowerment. Last seen at VMFA in the 2019 exhibition Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment, Sherpa’s groundbreaking artwork continues to garner international acclaim. This focused mid-career retrospective is the global artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Tsherin Sherpa’s works are grounded in the traditional Buddhist art of his training but stretch, bend, reconfigure, and repurpose its forms to explore contemporary concerns. The exhibition’s 36 paintings and sculptures trace the evolution of his “Spirits” series whose subjects resemble Tibetan Buddhist deities transformed by the modern world. Dislocated from their home—an experience familiar to the artist and communities all over the world—these figures move from grief and confusion, to courage and self-assurance, to triumph and wisdom. In their multiple manifestations, the Spirits reveal the power and endurance of transformation.

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Exhibition Highlights

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The exhibition is curated by Dr. John Henry Rice, VMFA’s E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art.

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Tsherin Sherpa: Spirits is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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Canvas at VMFA
Fabergé Ball Endowment

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The Ellen Bayard Weedon Foundation

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Anne Battle and Leonard Slater
Susan L. Buck in memory of Ed Chappell
Nancy and Wayne Chasen
Heather Daniel, Barrie McDowell, and Susan Russell
Birch Douglass
Arnel Manalo
Teri Craig Miles
Mr. Hubert G. Phipps
Jacquelyn Holley Pogue
Ms. Jennifer L. Schooley and Mr. William Bradley Burch

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VMFA is also grateful to the following sponsors:

Nupa Agarwal, Esq. | Michael and Maura Bisceglia | Paula and Charles Collins | Philip and Kay Davidson | Mr. James W. Klaus | Deanna M. Maneker | Amy and Sean McGlynn | John McGurl and Michelle Gluck | Jaclyn Miller, Ph.D. | Mr. and Mrs. Stanley J. Olander, Jr. | Dr. and Mrs. Carl Patow | Reynolds Gallery | Dr. Bibhakar Sunder Shakya | SouthState Bank | Mr. and Mrs. John Stark |Shantaram and Sunita Talegaonkar | Stephen C. Thompson, Jr. and Jon McCue | Ting Xu and Evergreen Enterprises | A VMFA Supporter