Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) Announces Recent Acquisitions

An early canvas by French painter Paul Signac (1863–1935), The Haystack illustrates the artist’s synthesis of Impressionism and early Post-Impressionism. Although haystacks as a subject are most often associated with the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, he did not in fact begin painting them until after he was introduced to Signac’s work.

Depicting a Gloucester, Massachusetts, beach crowded with tourists, this painting by Polish American artist Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002) reflects the influence of Ashcan painters like Robert Henri and John Sloan. Bernstein, who lived to be 112, remained committed to realism her entire life, specializing in figural groups such as this one.

For his “Della Robske” series of glazed stoneware pieces, Philadelphia-born ceramicist and social activist Robert Lugo (b. 1981) drew inspiration from the commemorative ceramic roundels made by the della Robbia family in 15th-century Florence. In this piece, a youthful Ice Cube wears a hat emblazoned with the word “Compton,” a reference to his rap group N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton.

In this bronze sculpture by renowned Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025), a coyote, the trickster of tribal myth, stands atop a canoe piled with cast plastic refuse, including water bottles and Styrofoam cups. Despite its reference to environmental harm, the work’s title also suggests that the planet might be healed through the traditional Indigenous understanding of the land as a living relative.  

This tondo by Vietnamese-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976) is made of flattened brass artillery shell casings. Conjuring the scales of a dragon, a protective animal in Vietnamese mythology, the work reflects on the U.S. military’s involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.