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.

Fine Arts & Flowers: 2010 is presented by The Council of VMFA

Fine Arts & Flowers Speakers

Hitomi Gilliam AIFD is a noted Canadian floral designer, lecturer and author known for her creativity, innovation and contemporary abstract styles. An international designer, she is currently the Creative & Education Director for DESIGN358, a floral design school and event company. In addition, she is one of only seven recipients of the AIFD ‘Design Influence’ Award given for signature design style.
www.hitomi-art.com

Allan M. Armitage, widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost horticulturists, and is well known as a writer, speaker and researcher. At the University of Georgia, he runs the research gardens where new garden plants are evaluated. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his interest in new crop research has resulted in the Sunlover Series of Coleus and Ipomoea‘Margarita’.
www.allanarmitage.net

Bryan Rafanelli, event planner extraordinaire, leads one of the most well known events teams in the country, with over 100 events planned annually throughout the world, including the Commander-in-Chief’s Ball in celebration of the inauguration of President of Barack Obama. He has made multiple guest appearances on NBC’s Today, and his work has been highlighted in numerous publications including Bride, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, and more.
www.rafanellievents.com

Dutch born designer, speaker, and educator René van Rems AIFD, is a world-renowned ambassador of the floral industry specializing in European-influenced styles. He has led design shows, workshops, and seminars throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. René and his work have been covered on HGTV and in magazines such as Sunset and Better Homes and Gardens. In 2009, he was recognized with the American Institute of Floral Designers (AIFD) Award of Distinguished Service to the Floral Industry.
www.renevanrems.com

Jewelry Fair

The Jewelry Fair makes a shining return to Fine Arts & Flowers 2010.  Sixteen master artists will offer for sale their uniquely designed, classical to contemporary, handcrafted jewelry. Originality, meticulous attention to detail, and materials of the highest quality are hallmarks of these designers. At last, art from the museum that you can take home!

Alchemic Synthesis
Alderdice / Mansfield
Annapolis, MD
www.alderdicemansfield.com

Barbara Bayne
Havre de Grace, MD
www.barbarabayne.com

Vicki Eisenfeld
West Hartford, CT
www.vickieisenfeld.com

Felice Designs
Felice Killian
Charleston, SC
www.felicedesigns.com

Lilly Fitzgerald
Spencer, MA
www.lillyfitzgerald.com

Maenad Design
Julia Fluker
Baltimore, MD
www.maenaddesign.com

Pat Flynn
High Falls, NY
www.patflynninc.com

Elizabeth Garvin
New York, NY
www.elizabethgarvin.com

Stuart Golder
Cincinnati, OH
www.stuartgolder.com

Valerie Hector
Wilmette, IL
www.valeriehector.com

Barbara Heinrich
Pittsford, NY
www.barbaraheinrichstudio.com

Seven Fingers, Inc.
Tom Herman
Stone Ridge, NY
www.sevenfingers.com

Judith Kaufman
West Hartford, CT
www.judithkaufman.com

Ayesha Mayadas
Englewood, NJ
www.ayeshastudio.com

Minor / Hentz
Barbara Minor and Christopher Hentz
Baton Rouge, LA
www.barbaraminor.com

Rebecca Myers
Baltimore, MD
www.rebeccamyersdesign.com

This ground-breaking exhibition, Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950, features the work of 18 photographers, new media, and video artists who lived and worked in South Africa during the apartheid era (1948-1994), as well as younger artists who have gained international prominence since then.

“Darkroom’s” eight sections highlight the ways that these artists have addressed South African culture from various perspectives, and their increased presence in the global art world since 1994. It examines the use of analog and digital media, still and moving pictures, and two- and three-dimensional formats to express relationships between mid-twentieth-century approaches and more recent ones, and differing concerns among artists of successive generations.

“The social and political transformation of South Africa is one of the most remarkable stories of the second half of the twentieth century,” says Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “To engage with it directly through the eyes of those who experienced and documented the anguish, turmoil and elation of the period is both uplifting and thought-provoking.”

This extensive exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Two-thirds of the exhibition will be at the VMFA, and one-third will be featured at the Visual Arts Center. A companion exhibition by contemporary South African artist and Richmond resident, Siemon Allen will be on view at the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University

 

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Tosha Grantham, Consulting Curator. with the support of the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation

Chuck Close: People Who Matter to Me exhibition presents some two dozen works by Chuck Close spanning a thirty-five year period from 1974 to the present.

The exhibition brings together works from VMFA’s permanent collection with loans from Frances Lewis and from the artist himself. Major VMFA donors, Sydney and Frances Lewis, enjoyed a particularly warm friendship with Close and this exhibition celebrates that connection and presents a broad overview of Close’s work.

It will feature a spectrum of the media in which Close has worked, and will include portraits of many of his most important subjects with a special focus on composer Philip Glass, for whom the Lewises served as patrons.

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.

German Expressionist Art: Selections from the Fischer Collection includes major works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Pechstein, Conrad Felixmüller, and Otto Müller.

German Expressionism, one of the most powerful movements in all 20th-century art, evolved when a handful of artists in Dresden, Munich, and Berlin led a crusade away from the Impressionists’ obsession with visual effects on behalf of moral indignation and more humanistic concerns. The emphasis in the Fischer Collection is on the artists who belonged to Die Brücke, or the Bridge, one of the movement’s central groups.

The exhibition is supported by The Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Endowment for Exhibitions.

This selection of newly acquired works comes from the museum’s Ludwig and Rosy Fischer Collection, collected by the couple in Frankfurt, Germany, between 1905 and 1925, and acquired by the museum in 2009. It is one of the most exceptional privately assembled collections of German Expressionist art in the country.

One of the world’s finest collections of early American quilts will be on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the fall of 2010. The Winterthur Museum in Delaware is famed for its period room settings featuring the remarkable collection of furniture, fabrics, quilts, and decorative arts collected by Henry Francis du Pont (1880–1969). For the first time ever a selection of more than 40 of the most stunning quilts are traveling for a strictly limited period, allowing a unique opportunity to view these incomparable works in detail.

In addition to showcasing the quilts’ aesthetic qualities, the exhibition explores the lives of their makers, as well as the political, economic and technological developments that shaped production of the quilts. The exhibition will offer an absorbing insight into women’s political, social, and cultural lives in the formative period of the early American republic (1760–1850). “American Quilts” also includes several rare prototypes of bed coverings that were imported to this country as luxury goods from Europe and East India.

American Quilts: Selections from the Winterthur Collection is organized by Winterthur and curated by Linda Eaton, Senior Curator of Textiles at Winterthur.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund and the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment.

The Banner Exhibition Program at VMFA is made possible by theJulia Louise Reynolds Fund.

 

Corot to Cezanne: French Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon of over 75 drawings and watercolors charts the history of works on paper in 19th and early 20th century France. It opens with artists of the Romantic period including such great names as Delacroix, Gericault, and Ingres, who is represented by a group of masterful portraits.

The exhibition showcases a remarkable series of works by pre-Impressionist and Impressionist artists, including Boudin, Renoir, Degas, Morisot and Pissarro demonstrating their facility as astute observers of modern life.

Van Gogh and Cezanne are present with a small selection of masterpieces, as are major figures of the 20th century, Picasso, Matisse and Dufy.

This exhibition is supported by the Paul Mellon Endowment.

This exhibition has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art in collaboration with the Graduate Program in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University.

This will be the first exhibition VMFA has ever presented of one of Virginia’s most celebrated contemporary artists,  Sally Mann. The exhibition focuses on the theme of the body and emphasizes Mann’s new work, while selectively introducing earlier images.

Some of the works in the exhibition include nudity and other graphic material. Viewer and parental discretion is advised.

Mann’s most recent work represents an intriguing new direction. She is tackling expansive themes of mortality and vulnerability, while for the first time using herself and her husband as subjects. In addition, she has taken her bold experiments with the medium to new heights, pushing photography to its limits by making painterly and nearly abstract images—many as unique pieces on glass plates. Altogether the exhibition and accompanying catalogue will present an unexpected picture of Mann’s work, encouraging a fresh perspective on one of today’s preeminent photographers and, it is hoped, an opportunity to extend her visibility well beyond the realm of photography. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

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.

VMFA is pleased to acknowledge contributions from Gagosian Gallery, Mary and Don Shockey, and Alan I. Kirshner.

Kaneko’s works have been chosen for the inaugural exhibition in the garden for their sensational physical presence and stunning beauty. They also make fascinating connections to the history of monumental public sculpture, to ancient Shinto concepts, to traditional ceramic techniques, and to industrial manufacturing processes.

The first special exhibition in the new E. Claiborne and Lora Robins Sculpture Garden will feature colossal sculpture by master ceramicist Jun Kaneko (born 1942). Kaneko is an internationally renowned Japanese-American artist based in Omaha, Neb. He is designing an installation that will include one of his monumental heads – 8.5 feet tall and weighing three tons – reminiscent of figures found on Easter Island, and at least 8 of his dangos, which are slender, 9-foot-tall, totem-like forms.

Kaneko was born in Nagoya, Japan, and came to the United States in 1963 to study painting at the Chouinard Institute of Art in Los Angeles, where he became interested in sculptural ceramics. Kaneko has taught at some of the nation’s leading art schools and his work appears in numerous international solo and group exhibitions annually. Kaneko sculptures are included in more than 70 museum collections, and he has realized more than 30 public art commissions in the United States and Japan.

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 Japanese artist Kawase Hasui (1883 – 1957) was born in the Shiba ward of Tokyo. The Kawase family’s fourth child and first son, Hasui nearly did not become an artist. He was not only expected to take over the family business but also rebuffed in his later attempt to join the atelier of painter Kaburagi Kiyokata (1878 – 1973). At age twenty-five, Hasui was thought to be too old to begin artistic studies. After two years and several attempts, however, he was finally accepted into Kaburagi’s studio.

During his early years, Hasui worked primarily as a commercial illustrator for magazines and advertisements. His career path changed in 1918 when he saw an exhibition of prints by Ito Shinsui and was inspired to create prints of his own. That same year, Hasui’s first experimental prints were published by Watanabe Shozaburo, 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. However, the sensibility of this new style was very different from ukiyo-e: instead of the flat, stylized planes typical in ukiyo-e, shin-hanga incorporated aspects of Western draftsmanship and printmaking, including perspective and volumetric shading.

This exhibition features fifteen woodblock color prints by Hasui, selected from more than 320 Hasui prints donated to VMFA by René and Carolyn Balcer in 2006. These works, which focus on the season of spring, celebrate new life and nature’s renewal and symbolize hopefulness for a prosperous year.

From the Collection

Kawase Hasui, Kiyomizu Hall, Ueno, from the series Twenty Views of Tokyo (Tokyo nijukei, Ueno Kiyomizudo), 1928

Kawase Hasui, Yudaki Falls, Nikko (Nikko Yudaki), 1941

Kawase Hasui, Spring Evening at the Tosho Shrine, Ueno (Haru no yu [Ueno Toshogu]), 1948

Kawase Hasui, Kabe Island, Hizen, from the series Selection of Scenes of Japan (Nihon fukei senshu, Hizen Kabeshima), 1922

Apocalypse: Monumental Paintings of the 1980s exhibition includes three rarely-exhibited oversized works from VMFA’s permanent collection—by Robert Longo, Robert Morris, and Julian Schnabel. Together they create a powerful display that addresses many of the concerns of art during a time when painting regained the high ground.

Painting—criticized since the early 20th century as a limited and backward practice—was declared fully dead by the 1960s when Minimalist and Conceptual artists championed sculpture and other less-conventional media as preferred forms of expression. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, a new generation returned to painting with a vengeance, restoring much of what had been jettisoned in previous efforts to shore up its status.

Forming a vigorous but unfixed Postmodernists wave, these young artists reintroduced narrative, metaphor, allegory, symbolism, history, and myth into their work–often using the figure and expressionistic brushwork as vehicles. They arrived under monikers such as Neo-Expressionism, Trans-Avant-Garde, New Image, and Pictures Generation (other examples can be seen in several nearby Lewis galleries). Sometimes socially and politically conscious, at other times introspective and psychological, they embraced pluralism rather than progress and purity. Their work tended to be large, immediate, and committed to subject matter shot through with ambivalence.

Many of these artists emerged in the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate era, a time characterized not only by a loss of faith in leaders and government but also by unsettling economic and political events, including high unemployment, inflation, the oil crisis, an escalating Mid-East conflict, and continued polarization between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this context that included an expanding arms race and threat of nuclear holocaust, the theatrical, even operatic tones that defined much new painting of the time suggests a necessary response to both the attraction and repulsion of apocalyptically scaled fears.

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 Fleeting Glimpse : Selections in Modern and Contemporary Photography features 35 photographs from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Amy Moorefield, Director, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Roanoke and Christine Carr, photographer and assistant professor, Hollins University.

Featuring artists who transform common found occurrences in nature and humanity into unusual encounters and strange juxtapositions, this exhibition is the first major focus on the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ photography collection and marks the first collection sharing project with the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va.

The exhibition features provocative legends of the camera, including Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Blythe Bohnen, Judy Dater, Jen Davis, John Divola, Robert Doisneau, Martin Dorbaum, David A. Douglas, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Emmet William Gowin, John N. Heroy, Jr., Richard Kent Hough, Connie Imboden, Alen MacWeeney, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ray Metzker, Joseph Mills, Brian H. Peterson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Jerry N. Uelsmann, Garry Winogrand, and Willie Anne Wright.

The Fleeting Glimpse is on view at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University from September 16-December 4, 2010 and then on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition will travel throughout the Commonwealth in 2011.

The privately held Becker Collection, now digitally archived at Boston College, contains approximately 650 previously unexhibited drawings by mid-19th-century American artist-reporters Joseph Becker and colleagues.

On assignment for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, the era’s leading illustrated periodical, these so-called Special Artists of the Civil War produced “first-hand” drawings that were sent to New York for translation into printed engravings. The sketches, many of which were never published, document in lively and specific ways compelling scenes on the battlefield and in camp; many are set in Virginia. Unlike the period’s laborious photography and other reproductive imagery, the Leslie artists’ eyewitness impressions reveal fresh aspects of America’s divisive trial. This special exhibition of some 90 drawings, presented in collaboration with the University of Richmond Museums, coincides with the country’s Civil War Sesquicentennial.

Organizer

Traveling exhibition organized by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California. Drawings from the Becker Collection premiered at the McMullen Museum at Boston College in the exhibition “First Hand: Civil War Drawings from the Becker Collection,” which was organized by the McMullen Museum and underwritten by Boston College and Patrons of the McMullen Museum.

Curators

Judith Bookbinder, part-time faculty, and Sheila Gallagher, Assistant Professor, Fine Arts Department, Boston College

VMFA Coordinator
Dr. Sylvia Yount, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art

University of Richmond Museum Coordinator
Richard Waller, Executive Director

Catalog

“First Hand: Civil War Drawings from the Becker Collection,” edited by Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher; paperback; 274 pages with 118 color plates; $50

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts proudly announces a landmark exhibition in honor of its 75th anniversary, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris. VMFA is the only East Coast venue for the exhibition’s seven-city international tour. The exhibition, which will be on view from February 19 through May 15, 2011, is co-organized by the Musée National Picasso, Paris and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Tickets are available now.

Drawn from the collection of the Musée National Picasso in Paris, the largest and most significant repository of the artist’s work in the world, this exhibition represents works produced during every major artistic period of Pablo Picasso’s eight-decade career. It includes 176 works from Picasso’s personal collection – art that he kept for himself with the purpose of shaping his own legacy. Altria Group is the presenting sponsor for the exhibition.

“By bringing this major international exhibition to the Commonwealth, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is celebrating its 75th anniversary year in a significant way, by presenting a remarkable gift to all Virginians and Americans,” states Bob McDonnell, Governor of Virginia. “I encourage all our citizens and those outside the Commonwealth to come visit Virginia’s museum and enjoy the Picasso exhibition. Virginia is a wonderful destination for so many experiences, including world-class art.”

“This exhibition is without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the American public,” says Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “An exhibition this monumental is extremely rare, especially one that spans the entire career of a figure who many consider the most influential, innovative, and creative artist of the 20th century.”

In addition to showcasing some of Picasso’s most outstanding works, the exhibition tells a compelling story about the development of the artist’s career, his artistic inspirations, and his profound impact on modern art.

The unique opportunity to exhibit Picasso’s work at this time is possible because the Musée Picasso National in Paris is closed for renovations until 2012, allowing for a global tour of this full-scale survey to travel for the first and possibly only time.

“We are extremely proud to be partnering with VMFA to bring such a significant art exhibition to our Richmond headquarters community,” said Marty Barrington, executive vice president, Altria Group, and VMFA trustee. “With the Picasso exhibition, VMFA continues to realize its vision of world-class quality that will make Richmond a leading destination for fine art in the United States. Altria is pleased to support this exhibition, which will enrich our Richmond community in many ways.”

About the Art

Renowned worldwide, the collection from the Musée National Picasso, Paris is unique because it represents the pieces that Picasso set aside for his own personal collection. Acting almost as a curator for his art, Picasso kept some of his most iconic pieces from each phase of his work, including the Blue Period, Rose Period, Cubism, the return to Classicism, Surrealism, and his later work.

The exhibition will showcase moments and art that defined Picasso’s early career, including a deathbed portrait of the artist’s close friend Carlos Casagemas. His friend’s suicide partially influenced Picasso’s famed Blue Period, defined by somber paintings in shades of blue and green. Celestina (The Woman with One-Eye) (1904), a masterpiece from the Blue Period, will be featured in the exhibition.

Friends, lovers, and artists who influenced Picasso play a seminal role in the exhibition. Portraits of his mistresses, such as Reading (1932) and Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), feature his muses in various emotional states ranging from regal composure to inconsolable despair. Works ranging from studies for his early groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), to some of the last works of his career show his connection to, and often competition with, other notable artists from his past and present such as Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, and Diego Velázquez. The exhibition includes examples of almost every medium in which Picasso worked –oil on canvas and panel, cast bronze, carved wood, assemblages of found materials, watercolors, drawings in pastel, charcoal, pencil, and ink; various printmaking techniques, and illustrated books.

While Picasso contributed to and even inspired countless movements, he and Braques co-invented an entirely new movement: Cubism. Focused on fragmentation, shifting planes, and skewed perspectives, Cubism revolved around the deconstruction and reconstruction of figures and objects on two-dimensional surfaces or in space with new materials. The exhibition includes classical examples of Analytic Cubism, such as the famous Parisian landmark Le Sacré-Coeur (1909-1910), and several paintings of figures with musical instruments where the subjects are torqued and faceted almost beyond recognition.

About the Artist

Born in the southern Spanish city of Málaga in 1881, Pablo Picasso’s towering reputation spanned a long and productive career that began at a young age. After studying art in Barcelona—where he entered the School of Fine Arts at age thirteen—and Madrid, he first traveled to Paris in 1900, the city whose art and culture would greatly influence him and where he would first make his mark. By the time of his death in 1973 he had created an astounding 50,000 works in many different artistic mediums.

Picasso frequently shifted from one stylistic mode to another, moving through various forms of expression to match his protean vision and resist being constrained by any single style or movement. His exploration of different theories and techniques led to art that was inspired by Classicism, Surrealism, and African art, among other sources.

Involved in almost every artistic movement during his lifetime, he is recognized as one of the most powerful and creative forces of the 20th century. Never one to rest on his laurels, Picasso was constantly reinventing himself and searching for new sources of inspiration, both from the modern age and from the work of past artists and artworks. This exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the depth and breadth of Picasso’s genius. His revolutionary artistic achievements brought him universal praise and fame, and his art continues to inspire viewers as well as artists in a range of creative fields.

A Celebration of Print: 500 Years of Graphic Art celebrates the extraordinary gift of approximately 10,000 prints from the collection of collector, connoisseur, and scholar Frank Raysor, who grew up in Richmond.

Over the past 35 years Raysor has amassed a collection which covers the history of printmaking, as seen in this exhibition, and which also contains special deep holdings in artists such as Charles Meryon, Félix Bracquemond, Seymour Haden and Wenceslaus Hollar. The collection will increase by one third the total number of objects in VMFA’s collection.

This major exhibition will feature some of the most important examples of brass, copper, stone and terracotta sculpture from West Africa ever to be exhibited in the United States.

Artists of the Kingdom of Ife (in what is today southwestern Nigeria), created sculptures that were among the most beautiful and sophisticated works of art being produced anywhere in the world at the time. Dating from the 12th to 15th centuries A,D., the arts of Ife are noteworthy for their visual power, iconic complexity and variability of form.

One of the  high points of the exhibition is a group of awe-inspiring, life-size portrait heads of copper and various alloys that used techniques far in advance of anything available in Europe or China at the time. Surprisingly, in light of the unique importance of Ife art and civilization, no broad-based museum exhibition outside of Ife itself has featured these works. The Nigerian government’s exceptional commitment to the project, with loans from the magnificent collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, has led to the inclusion of approximately 100 of the most famous and beautiful Ife objects.

Previously shown at the British Museum , the exhibition was described by critics as “flabbergasting”, “once in a lifetime” and containing “artworks that rank with the Terracotta Army, the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamun as treasures of the human spirit”. In the Sunday Times, critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote: “A glorious display of Ife sculpture has arrived at the British Museum. Nobody — and I mean nobody — in Britain should miss it. Why? Because it changes our understanding of civilisation. Because it rewrites the story of art. Because it is a once-in-a-lifetime revolutionary event. If none of those is a big enough reason for you, then go along merely to enjoy some of the most graceful and lovely sculpture ever made. Trust me. You need to see this one.”
Organized by the Museum for African Art in New York, in collaboration with the Fundación Marcelino Botín of Santander, Spain, and the Nigerian National Commission on Museums and Monuments.Curated by Dr Enid Schildkrout, Chief Curator, Museum for African Art.

Accompanied by a full-color, 186 page catalogue

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression with a mandate from the General Assembly “To promote throughout the Commonwealth education in the realm of art.” The initial gift of 51 artworks by Virginian Judge John Barton Payne provided the basis for the collection that would fulfill the museum’s mission. Throughout VMFA’s history many generous patrons have followed in Payne’s footsteps. All of VMFA’s artworks were either donated to the museum or purchased using private money given expressly for the purpose of acquiring art. Once an object enters VMFA’s collection it becomes property of the Commonwealth and serves as a cherished resource that all of its citizens share.

Over the past 75 years the museum has carefully assembled a collection that now numbers more than 20,000 works of art spanning more than 6,000 years. During VMFA’s 75th anniversary year the museum has organized two exhibitions that are traveling to statewide partners throughout Virginia in order to showcase the history and breadth of the collection. This installation features a selection of works that are featured in these exhibitions.

Sharing works of art from the permanent collection throughout the Commonwealth is a signature component of VMFA’s outreach effort. The museum has taken its artworks to Virginia communities in a variety of ways, evolving from its early history of occasional displays in private and public venues to the year-long exhibitions available through the fleet of Artmobiles that crisscrossed the state. More recently VMFA has partnered with local institutions to provide technical assistance to help them adapt, or sometimes acquire or build, museum facilities that could safely host exhibitions from VMFA as well as from other public and private sources. Last year VMFA sponsored 3,000 statewide programs that served 355,550 Virginia citizens.

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Corey Piper, curatorial associate for the Mellon Collections..

Taking its title from a series of drawings and prints by Henry Alken depicting sketches of country life, Scraps: British Sporting Drawings from the Paul Mellon Collection features drawings and watercolors that showcase the passing moments of observation that comprise the rich world of British Sporting Art. Works in the exhibition range from pencil sketches which record the artist’s direct observation of animal subjects to more highly finished works which present a more fully developed vision of sport and country life.  

Free admission to this exhibition is supported by the Paul Mellon Endowment.

This exhibition has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Corey Piper, Curatorial Associate for the Mellon Collections.