The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is closing an exhibition that places two very different artistic visions of George Washington in conversation. Titus Kaphar and Junius Brutus Stearns: Pictures More Famous than the Truth juxtaposes 19th-century depictions of Washington by Junius Brutus Stearns with 21st-century portraits and sculptural works by contemporary artist Titus Kaphar. The exhibition closes July 26.
The premise is straightforward but consequential: it asks viewers to consider how an image of a founding figure is made, repeated, and reinterpreted over time. By staging Stearns’ historical paintings beside Kaphar’s contemporary responses, VMFA has framed Washington not as a fixed symbol but as a subject whose meanings continue to shift. In a museum context, that approach is especially pointed, because it sets the authority of the canon against an artist working in the present to question how history is represented.
The show also carries particular resonance at VMFA, where questions of American history, memory, and interpretation can be read alongside the museum’s wider programming this month. The museum’s July highlights emphasize that it remains open 365 days a year, including July 4, and place the Washington exhibition within a busy season that also includes talks, performances, and special events around India’s Great Mughals: Art, Power, and Opulence. Against that backdrop, the Kaphar-Stearns exhibition stands out as one of the museum’s more direct engagements with the politics of looking at national history.
Titus Kaphar has built a reputation for reexamining the visual record of Black life and American history, often by intervening in inherited images and the stories they carry. Although the source material here does not provide details of individual works on view, the exhibition’s structure makes clear that Kaphar’s contributions are intended as contemporary perspectives on Washington, not simple illustrative counterpoints. That makes the show part of a broader museum trend toward exhibitions that test how historical painting can be reread through present-day artistic practice.
For VMFA, the exhibition’s importance lies in how it uses the gallery to stage an argument about truth, image, and memory. Stearns’ 19th-century paintings belong to a long tradition of idealizing Washington, while Kaphar’s works bring the subject into a contemporary conversation about who gets to define the national story. Such pairings can sharpen public understanding of both artists: the historical painter as a maker of civic myth, and the contemporary artist as a critic of the inherited image.
As the exhibition comes to a close, VMFA is offering visitors one last chance to see the works together and to consider how a familiar founding figure can still produce new interpretive friction. In an art world increasingly attentive to how museums contextualize canonical subjects, the exhibition’s closing is notable not just as a calendar item but as a reminder that historical painting remains an active field of debate when placed in dialogue with contemporary art.
