Image: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Pam Fox’s ‘Still Light’ is on view at VMFA’s Amuse Restaurant and Claiborne Robertson Room from August 12, 2026, through February 15, 2027. The Amuse Restaurant and Claiborne Robertson Room are among the VMFA spaces dedicated to showcasing work by recipients of the museum’s Visual Arts Fellowship.
Many of the flowers, vines and ferns Fox photographs are gathered from her yard and neighborhood in the morning before she begins to work. Because time acts quickly on the plants, she has only a brief period to arrange each image before they change.
Fox photographs using sunlight moving through fabric, a fleeting light source that illuminates the arrangements from behind and casts their shadows forward. Objects behind the loosely woven fabric distort, shapes break down, and foreground, background and fabric merge into one another. Fox describes the resulting images as ambiguous yet unmanipulated.
She is drawn to ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, for the quality of attention it requires. When successful, she says, an arrangement can enhance the essence of its materials and allude to something intangible: the tension between permanence and ephemerality. Fox identifies that tension as the space where she is working.
Fox previously received VMFA Professional Visual Arts Fellowships in 2003–04 and 2011–12. Established in 1940 by John Lee Pratt of Fredericksburg, VMFA’s Fellowship Program supports professional artists and art students in Virginia who demonstrate exceptional creative ability in their chosen discipline.
