Virginia Museum of Fine Arts pairs George Washington scenes with six Kaphar works
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is showing Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous Than the Truth, an exhibition that puts george washington in scenes by Junius Brutus Stearns beside six works by Titus Kaphar. The show is part of Virginia’s semiquincentennial commemoration and presents Washington as a slaveholder rather than only as a national image.
The pairing centers on two artists with very different approaches. Stearns, a 19th-century artist, made imagined scenes of Washington’s life that circulated widely in their time, while Kaphar’s contribution includes two sculptures and paintings done in oil on linen, torn fabric and sculpted tar.
VMFA and Junius Brutus Stearns
Stearns did not paint portraits in this series. His works are imagined scenes, and the museum is placing them in direct conversation with Kaphar’s six works. That arrangement gives visitors two versions of the same figure: one built from widely shared historical imagery, the other built to confront the fact that Washington enslaved many others.
The exhibition is part of Virginia’s state commemoration of the semiquincentennial, which puts it within the broader 250th anniversary period. For visitors, that means the show is not just about one museum display; it is part of the public face of how Virginia is marking the anniversary.
Titus Kaphar’s George Washington
Kaphar’s works approach Washington with seriousness and respect while presenting him as a flawed human being who enslaved many others. The artist is also married to a descendant of George Washington, a detail that gives the exhibition’s framing an added personal layer without changing its central claim.
The show makes Washington seem like anything but a saint, and that is the point of the contrast. The exhibition does not replace one image with another; it sets celebratory imagery beside work that carries slavery into the same frame.
Virginia’s semiquincentennial
The practical effect for a museum visitor is straightforward: the exhibition asks them to see Washington through two sets of works, not one. That means the display is built around comparison, with Stearns’s imagined scenes and Kaphar’s six works carrying the argument inside the galleries rather than outside them.
For readers following Virginia’s semiquincentennial programming, the show adds a more complicated public history of George Washington to the anniversary calendar. The museum has chosen not to present him as a fixed icon, but as a subject whose image can hold celebration and slavery at the same time.
