Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts Announces Gift Of Nearly 2000 Photographs

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has expanded its photography holdings with a gift that reaches across nearly two centuries of the medium's history. Joy of Giving Something Inc., the nonprofit devoted to photographic arts, has donated nearly 2,000 photographs to the Richmond museum, with works by more than 450 artists represented in the group.

The donation comes largely from the collection assembled by financier and former Dreyfus Corporation chief Howard Stein (1926–2011), who began collecting photography in the 1980s. Stein and his wife, Janet, founded the Joy of Giving Something Foundation in 1998 to support art and educational programming in the field. Since 2017, the foundation has been placing works from Stein's collection with museums and universities, including Syracuse University, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of the City of New York.

VMFA had already received photographic portfolios and series from JGS in 2023, among them Paul Strand's“Photographs of Mexico” (1940) and Larry Clark's“Tulsa” (1980). The new gift represents most of the foundation's remaining collection and brings together a wide historical range: 19th-century photographs by Eugène Atget and Nadar; modernist works by Alfred Stieglitz, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray; documentary images by Berenice Abbot, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Mary Ellen Mark; and contemporary work by Adam Fuss, David Goldblatt, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, and Rosalind Fox Solomon.

The donation also includes a grant to support cataloging and housing the collection, a practical addition that will shape how the works can be studied and shown. That support arrives as VMFA moves ahead with a major expansion and renovation project that will add five new photography galleries, scheduled to open in 2027.

“Through its breadth and depth, this gift significantly elevates the museum's standing as a center for the study and presentation of photography,” said Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA's Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper. She added that the gift will open“new directions for future collecting” and serve as a cornerstone for exhibitions and rotations in the new galleries.

For VMFA, the acquisition is more than an enlargement of the collection. It gives the museum a stronger historical spine for photography at a moment when the institution is preparing to present the medium on a larger scale.

MENAFN20052026005694012507ID1111147337