Current exhibitions
 Photography in Virginia
November 1, 2008–May 3, 2009
Photography has documented and interpreted life in Virginia for more than 150 years. A major photography exhibition organized by the VHS, Photography in Virginia will survey this visual record, using only work made in Virginia and presenting many images never before published or displayed. Included will be daguerreotypes, panoramas, amusement-park tintypes, lantern slides, photogravure, early experiments in color, and aerial photography.
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• Press release |
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 A Creative Dynasty: Four Generations of Virginia Women
August 16, 2008–January 18, 2009
This exhibition explores the careers of four generations of Virginia women who spent their lives involved with the arts. Julia Anne Morrison Blount, an artist and musician who died in 1877, was the mother of Sallie Lee Blount Mahood, an accomplished painter who studied in Paris. Helen Mahood McGehee, daughter of Sallie, helped found the Tampa Art Institute and was a violist for the Tampa Symphony Orchestra. Her daughter, Helen McGehee Umaña (pictured), is a world renowned dancer, choreographer, and teacher. This exhibit will include paintings, drawings, photographs, video clips, and sculpture related to these talented women.
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• Press release
 Heads and Tales
April 26, 2008–April 12, 2009 (first rotation)
Heads and Tales presents portraits of five people with compelling personal stories—a woman who inspired the English poet Alexander Pope; a royal governor who was murdered by a mob; a Federalist politician struggling against the tide in Jeffersonian Virginia; a patron of the arts who made his fortune as a robber baron in the Gilded Age; and a Virginia suffragette, freethinker, and political radical. Their tales are told by analysis of components of their pictorially complex portraits.
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• Press release | Online exhibition
 Virginians at Work
Long-term exhibition
This long-term exhibition tells the story of how Virginians have made a living and why jobs have changed over time. Focusing on people rather than on abstract principles, the exhibition follows four broad categories: "A Colonial Economy (1600–1780)"; "A Commercial Economy (1780–1865)"; "An Industrial Economy (1865–1945)"; and "A Service Economy (1945–2006)." These titles refer to the most dynamic elements of the economy for each period. Learn more
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• Press release
 The Story of Virginia, an American Experience
Long-term exhibition
This multi-gallery exhibition covers 16,000 years of Virginia history from prehistoric times to the present. It features a dugout canoe, a Conestoga wagon, a street car, and the largest collection of Virginia artifacts on long-term display.
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• Online exhibition | Order exhibition catalog
 The Virginia Manufactory of Arms Collection
Long-term exhibition
From 1802 to 1821, the state of Virginia did not rely on the federal government to arm its militia but manufactured its own weapons. This new exhibition presents a comprehensive collection of the products of the Virginia Manufactory of Arms, a state-of-the-art water-powered facility that stood in Richmond. On display are flintlock muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords, including examples of the weapons that were used by the militia defending Virginia during the British campaigns on Chesapeake Bay in 1813–14. This collection is important not only as a chapter in the history of armament, but also as evidence of an episode in the evolution of state and national interests in the early American republic.
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• Press release
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