Jaune Quick-to-See Smith canoe sculpture highlights recent acquisitions by Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has added a compelling and diverse array of artworks to the museum’s permanent collection over the past year. VMFA purchased 808 works of art and received 2,506 gifts from more than 50 generous donors, including the landmark donation of 1,989 photographs by the Joy of Giving Something, Inc.

Notable acquisitions were made in each of the museum’s 10 collection areas and the 3,314 additions deepen its holdings of both historical and contemporary artworks from across the globe, as well as by artists throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. In addition to supporting Virginia artists through its fellowship program, the museum acquired works by, among others, Ben Durham, Kevin Jerome Everson, Michelle Gagliano, Emmet Gowin, Virginia Granbery, Allyson Gray, Rebecca Hill, Susan Iverson, Aimee Joyaux, Adam Pendleton, Glenn Scarboro and Rippling Water/Christine Custalow.

“This remarkable roster of purchases and gifts demonstrates our ongoing commitment to expanding the museum’s holdings and enhancing accessibility to art,” said Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “Many of the newly acquired works will be shown in the new wing and renovated galleries after the completion of our transformative expansion project.”

VMFA’s renowned permanent collection has grown from 51 works of art at the time of the museum’s opening in 1936 to more than 50,000 today. Recent notable accessions into VMFA’s permanent collection include:

Making Medicine: Coyote (Going Forward, Looking Back), 2024-2025, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940-2025):

Making Medicine: Coyote (Going Forward, Looking Back) is a monumental bronze sculpture by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation who was arguably the most influential Indigenous American artist of the past century. The sculpture includes two reoccurring motifs in Smith’s practice: the canoe and the trickster figure of Coyote.

In Making Medicine, Coyote stands atop a pile of refuse held within the canoe, mostly made up of bronze casts of plastic water bottles and Styrofoam cups from fast-food restaurants. The familiarity of the refuse implicates the viewer, leveling an incisive critique of our shared treatment of the environment, which deviates from a traditional Indigenous understanding of land as a living relative to be treated with reverence, rather than as a tool for extraction. Making Medicine’s vessel also highlights the role held by canoes, including within Smith’s own Flathead Salish heritage: providing portage and a safe journey for the passengers within.

Despite the work’s reference to environmental harm, its title also suggests a level of hope. By referencing medicine and a cyclical understanding of time (forward, back), Smith’s Coyote invites engagement with ideas of collective healing and learning from our past mistakes to benefit future generations.

“This is a quintessentially Indigenous understanding of the responsibilities that we all hold as future ancestors and evokes a question central to the understanding of Smith as an artist: what can we accomplish together to shape a more just world?” said Siera Hyte, VMFA’s Schiller Family Curator of Indigenous American Art.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Making Medicine: Coyote (Going Forward, Looking Back) is currently on display in Waterways, a permanent collection installation in VMFA’s American Art galleries. 

The Haystack (La meule), 1882, Paul Signac (French, 1863-1935):

Among Paul Signac’s earliest works, The Haystack demonstrates the artist’s synthesis of Impressionism and early Postimpressionism. In 1879 at age sixteen, Signac visited the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition and was enamored by the paintings he saw on view. Signac soon left school, against his family’s wishes, to pursue a career as an artist.

His first paintings were made en plein air (outdoors) in northern France, including Guise in the Aisne department of Hauts-de-France, where he painted The Haystack. Now considered a quintessential Impressionist subject, haystacks are commonly associated with Claude Monet, although he did not depict them until 1884, after he was introduced to Signac’s work.

“The Haystack reveals many of the tenets that Signac learned from Monet and other Impressionist painters, including a close observation of nature and visible, energetic brushstrokes,” said Dr. Theresa A. Cunningham, VMFA’s Associate Curator of European Art and the Mellon Collections.

The Haystack is the first oil painting by Signac to enter VMFA’s collection, joining five watercolors and a color lithograph by the artist, and will be included in the museum’s upcoming exhibition, The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art, which opens on November 14, 2026.

Sun, Sand, and Sea, 1916, Theresa Bernstein (American, born Poland, 1890-2002):

Modeled in broad, thick brushstrokes that suggest form as much as they delineate it, Theresa Bernstein’s Sun, Sand, and Sea depicts a tourist-populated beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts. With its piercing natural light, busy harbor, visually stunning beaches, picturesque streets, uncultivated vistas and rocky outcroppings, Gloucester has long attracted American artists. Bernstein first went there in the summer of 1916, the year she completed this painting.

In this dynamic canvas, Bernstein divided the composition into three horizontal zones: brown and gray sky, blue water, and pinkish brown sand. The division of the picture plane into zones of color harkens to tonalist paintings by James McNeill Whistler and Robert Henri. Much of the charm of Sun, Sand, and Sea comes from the pronounced lines containing patterned, localized masses of color. Bernstein specialized in painting figural groups, and, in this work, the notes of color delineating umbrellas, dresses, hats and other elements oscillate between naturalism and abstractly dabbed notation.

“A stunning composition reflecting Bernstein’s encounter with Robert Henri’s vibrant brushwork and interest in spectacle, Sun, Sand, and Sea is an excellent fit with VMFA’s strong holdings of both Ashcan painting and American Impressionism,” said Dr. Leo G. Mazow, VMFA’s Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art.

Roundel with Boy from the Hood from the Della Robske Series, 2023, Roberto Lugo (American, born 1981):

In Roundel with Boy from the Hood, Philadelphia-born ceramicist, spoken-word poet, educator and social activist Roberto Lugo draws inspiration from Italian Renaissance ceramic roundels made by the della Robbia family in Florence to celebrate a contemporary cultural icon, rapper and hip hop-pioneer, Ice Cube. The work is part of Lugo’s Della Robske series, in which he adapts a centuries-old European sculptural format, traditionally used for religious subjects, civic leaders, and idealized youths, to honor figures from Black and Latino cultural history and to question who has historically been deemed worthy of commemoration.

In this piece, Ice Cube wears a black T-shirt and a black hat emblazoned with the word “Compton,” a reference to his groundbreaking rap group N.W.A. and their pivotal 1988 album Straight Outta Compton.

“Ice Cube’s image from this period, particularly the black cap, has since become iconic and has come to symbolize a moment when hip-hop emerged as a powerful political and social force in American culture,” said Dr. Alisa Chiles, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Decorative Arts, 1890 to the Present.

Scars, 2025, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (American, born Vietnam in 1976):

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, is best known for his mixed-media artworks, installations and video-based works. Scars centers around the Vietnamese mythology of dragons. Within this context, dragons symbolize a protective figure as well as one that brings rain and prosperity to Nguyen’s native country. This tondo is made up of over 1,000 discs that evoke the scales of a dragon and are made of repurposed artillery shell casings.

The dragon imagery created with artillery shells in this work reflects on the U.S. military’s involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. By manipulating the process of oxidation and patina on these shell casings, the artist was able to bring a painterly quality out of the metal, introducing a rich palette of turquoise and umber with flashes of Day-Glo safety orange that transforms these weapons of war into markers of survival.

“Scars uses the power of storytelling as a means for healing and empathy for traumatized communities, while also providing space for future regeneration,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

“These acquisitions affirm VMFA’s commitment to collecting artists that reshape the canon, expand the narratives of art history, and create points of connection for new audiences,” said Dr. Michael Taylor, VMFA’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator. “Over the past year the museum’s 17 curators have researched and acquired a wonderful array of artworks that reflect artistic innovation, storytelling, beauty and creativity in our region and across the globe.”

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is the only art museum in the United States open 365 days a year with free general admission. For more information about the museum’s world-class collection, visit www.VMFA.museum.