The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has acquired a present of 1,986 pictures from Joy of Giving Something Inc (JGS), a nonprofit organisation based by Howard and Janet Stein. The donation consists of works by greater than 450 artists and practically 200 photographic sequence from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries. The donated works largely come from the gathering assembled by Howard Stein (1926-2011), a financier who started buying pictures within the Nineteen Eighties and established JGS in 1998 to help images and humanities training initiatives.
Among the highlights of the reward are works by Charles Marville, Eugène Atget and Nadar, in addition to uncommon daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and prints by Gustave Le Gray. The donation additionally consists of practically 200 vernacular pictures and cased objects from the nineteenth century. Additionally, the reward consists of works by the Modernist photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, in addition to photographs by the photojournalists and documentarians Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Leonard Freed, Marc Riboud, Mary Ellen Mark and Margaret Bourke-White. Contemporary artists represented within the donation embrace Adam Fuss, David Goldblatt, Gilles Peress and Rosalind Fox Solomon.
Alfred Stieglitz, Music No. 1, 1922 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Joy of Giving Something Inc.
The VMFA acquired a bunch of photographic portfolios and sequence from JGS in 2023, together with Paul Strand’s Photographs of Mexico (1940) and Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). Following that switch, the JGS’s board elected to donate the overwhelming majority of the muse’s remaining assortment to the museum. The museum additionally acquired a grant to help the work required to catalogue and retailer the gifted works.
According to the VMFA, works from the JGS reward will function prominently within the museum’s new images galleries, that are scheduled to open in 2027 as a part of the establishment’s ongoing growth and renovation undertaking.
Evelyn Hofer, Girl with Bicycle, within the Coombe, Dublin, 1966 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Joy of Giving Something Inc
“One of the extraordinary aspects of this gift is that it enables the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to explore the work of so many talented photographers,” Alex Nyerges, the VMFA’s director and chief govt, mentioned in a press release. “Together, these wonderful works will strengthen our ability to present the rich history of photography in focused ways and augment opportunities for display and public programming in the museum’s five new photography galleries.”
Other establishments which have acquired donations of works from the JGS’s assortment embrace the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of the City of New York.