Experience engaging contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. REWIND<<Fast/Forward features a series of immersive art installations from the performative to the cinematic. Coinciding with the museum’s current expansion project, REWIND<<Fast/Forward is designed to engage visitors with contemporary art experiences while the museum’s collection of mid to late 20th-century art are temporarily off view.
Like its predecessor —Fast Forward, which ran at VMFA from 1984 through 2002—REWIND<<Fast/Forward pushes the elasticity of genres and media to highlight artists working at intersecting disciplines. REWIND<<Fast/Forward is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Upcoming Events
Ellen Fullman and JACK Quartet
Coming in 2026
Cochrane Atrium
This evening concert will feature Ellen Fullman performing on her iconic Long String Instrument and accompanied by the New York–based JACK Quartet. As the closing program for the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Cardbirds, Fullman will debut a VMFA-commissioned composition celebrating Rauschenberg’s practice as a groundbreaking artist who experimented with movement and material. The commission and exhibition, on the advent of the artist’s centennial celebration, are sponsored by a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Jason Moran
Coming in 2027
Cochrane Atrium
The VMFA recently acquired STAGED: Three Deuces by musician, composer, and visual artist Jason Moran. In this architectural reimagining of the historic jazz venue, Moran acknowledges the power of jazz lore, and the shifting social and political realities that shaped the genre. At a time when the popularity of jazz reached its peak in New York City, venues like Three Deuces were systematically destroyed by development and urban renewal. The devasting effects for the jazz world was the loss of historic venues that continue to inspire new generations of musicians. Designed to reimagine the club’s cramped stage, Moran has “restaged” the architecture replete with a piano, upright bass, and drum kit. While not being activated through live performance, the Spiro piano will play with Moran’s prerecorded performances from the swinging jazz song books played throughout the North as well as prison work songs from the same era associated with the South to shed light on the complexity of Black life in America during this era.