[5] One of the first museums in the American South to be operated by state funds, VMFA offers free admission, except for special exhibits.

The VMFA, together with the adjacent Virginia Historical Society, anchors the Museum District of Richmond, an area of the city known also as "West of the Boulevard".

Built in 1955 as a 500-seat theatre within the art museum, it started as a community theater and also hosted special programs in dance, film, and music.

[8] The site for the museum was chosen on Richmond's Boulevard, near the corner of a contiguous six-block tract of land used as a veterans' home for Confederate soldiers.

[citation needed] In 1951, the museum bought the abstract painting "Chimneys", created by a 20-year-old art student named Benjamin Leroy Wigfall at the historically Black Hampton Institute.

During his tenure, Cheek oversaw construction of the first addition, built in 1954 by Merrill C. Lee, Architects, of Richmond, and supported financially by Paul Mellon.

[23] The troupe's core members included Marie Goodman Hunter, Janet Bell, Lynda Myles, E.G. Marshall, Ken Letner, James Kirkland, Rachael Lindhart, and dramaturg M. Elizabeth Osborn.

Critic Clive Barnes of The New York Times hailed it as the "'Fowler Macbeth'... "splendidly vigorous... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'.

"[26] As Fowler heightened the professional quality of the theater, VMT led Richmond into what some recall as a golden age of theater.[when?]

Gurney, as well as by major foreign authors, such as Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Athol Fugard, and Peter Handke.

In 1975, the Soviet Arts Consul provided coverage on Moscow Television for Fowler's U.S premiere of Maxim Gorky's Our Father (originally Poslednje in Russian).

Fowler resigned in 1977 after a dispute with VMFA administration over the content in VMT's premiere of Romulus Linney's Childe Byron.

As with all American professional not-for-profit performing arts organizations, TheatreVirginia ran mounting deficits for years.

A study in 1987 showed that dealing with a board that was essentially constituted to oversee the art museum was difficult for the theatre company.

In 2002, a series of fatal sniper attacks in the metropolitan DC area and northern Virginia region killed five people in quick succession.

A gift of funds from Sydney and Frances Lewis of Richmond in 1971, provided for the acquisition of Art Nouveau objects and furniture.

It provided three more gallery areas – two for temporary exhibitions and one for the Lewis Family's Art Nouveau Collection while also housing a gift shop, members' dining room, and other visitor functions.

[citation needed] In the following years, the Lewis and Mellon families proposed major donations from their extensive private collections, and helped provide the funds to house them.

[39] The architects, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York, were chosen by the Lewises based on their appreciation of the firm's 1981 design for the Best Products headquarters building north of Richmond.

The VMFA undertook a $150-million[43] building expansion to increase the museum's gallery space by fifty percent, adding 165,000 square feet (15,300 m2).

[48] In 2019, Rumors of War was installed on the front lawn of the museum facing Arthur Ashe Boulevard after being displayed in Times Square.

In June 2021, the VMFA announced that architectural firm SmithGroup was designing a $190 million expansion of the museum and a renovation of current spaces such as the Evans Court and Leslie Cheek Theater.

[66] The work in bronze, which Wiley had titled Rumors of War, was modeled after one of Monument Avenue’s Confederate statues after he visited Richmond for a retrospective exhibition of his artwork held at the museum in 2016.

In addition to the engravings, the exhibit included six of the 1805 watercolors upon which Blake based them, on view and on loan from New York's Pierpont Morgan Library.

[69] In 2011, VMFA was one of seven museums worldwide chosen to exhibit one hundred seventy-six paintings from the personal collection of Pablo Picasso.

Director Alex Nyerges noted: "An exhibition this monumental is extremely rare, especially one that spans the entire career of a figure who many consider the most influential, innovative and creative artist of the 20th century."

[71] VMFA has offered in-house educational programs that are supported by multiple specialized studios and on-site exhibition space.

By 2011, fellowships were primarily funded through the Pratt endowment and supplemented by gifts from the Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation and the J. Warwick McClintic Jr.

[76] Notable recipients of VMFA fellowship grants include Vince Gilligan,[77] Emmet Gowin, David Freed, Laura Pharis, Richard Carlyon, and Nell Blaine.

[78] In 2004 VMFA deaccessed a Sixteenth Century French painting, “Portrait of Jean d’Albon,” which had been stolen from the Jewish Austrian collector Julius Priester by the Gestapo in 1944.