The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has received a gift of 1,986 photographs from Joy of Giving Something Inc (JGS), a nonprofit organisation founded by Howard and Janet Stein. The donation includes works by more than 450 artists and nearly 200 photographic series from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The donated works largely come from the collection assembled by Howard Stein (1926-2011), a financier who began acquiring photographs in the 1980s and established JGS in 1998 to support photography and arts education initiatives.
Among the highlights of the gift are works by Charles Marville, Eugène Atget and Nadar, as well as rare daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and prints by Gustave Le Gray. The donation also includes nearly 200 vernacular photographs and cased objects from the 19th century. Additionally, the gift includes works by the Modernist photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, as well as images 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 in the donation include 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 received a group of photographic portfolios and series from JGS in 2023, including Paul Strand’s Photographs of Mexico (1940) and Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). Following that transfer, the JGS’s board elected to donate the vast majority of the foundation’s remaining collection to the museum. The museum also received a grant to support the work required to catalogue and store the gifted works.
According to the VMFA, works from the JGS gift will feature prominently in the museum’s new photography galleries, which are scheduled to open in 2027 as part of the institution’s ongoing expansion and renovation project.
Evelyn Hofer, Girl with Bicycle, in 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 executive, said in a statement. “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 institutions that have received donations of works from the JGS’s collection include 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.
