John Daly-Peoples
Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Auckland Art Gallery
November 8th 2025–March 15 2026
John Daly-Peoples
This year the Auckland Art Gallery scored a great success with their “A century of Modern Art” exhibition sourced from the Toledo Museum of Art. Not only was it an extensive look at the art of the twentieth century but also included some significant works.
Later this year the gallery will be looking to repeat the success of that exhibition with “Pop to Present” a major show highlighting the diverse artistic voices from the United States, spanning from1945 to the present day.
Opening in November, “Pop to Present:” will be showing American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 52 works reflecting eight decades of extraordinary artistic experimentation and cultural transformation in the United States. The exhibition includes abstract paintings, vibrant Pop canvases and hyper-detailed photorealist compositions along with Minimalist sculptures, richly textured pieces inspired by craft and domestic traditions, and contemporary figurative works that explore questions of identity, power and representation.
Showcasing 28 works by women and African American and Indigenous artists, the exhibition places well-known names in conversation with artists from diverse backgrounds to offer a broad and inclusive overview of recent American art. Artists featured in this comprehensive survey include Benny Andrews, Thornton Dial, Roslyn Drexler, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Barkley L. Hendricks, Norman Lewis, Virgil Ortiz, Howardena Pindell, Jackson Pollock, Martin Puryear, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Mark Rothko, Kiki Smith, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol.
“Experimenting with new materials while responding to the cultural and technological shifts of their time, the artists featured in Pop to Present challenged America’s social and artistic norms in ways that are still meaningful today,” says Kenneth Brummel, Curator, International Art, Auckland Art Gallery. “The exhibition also presents a large number of works by artists rarely seen in this part of the world”
Standouts in the exhibition include” Forsythia and Pussy Willows Begin Spring” a vibrant colour-field abstraction by Alma Thomas, an iconic Pop landscape by Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis (1963).
Warhol’s “Triple Elvis” was based on the singer-turned-gunslinger portrait of Elvis Presley on a publicity photograph for the 1960 western Flaming Star. This public persona was ideally suited to Warhol’s aim to focus on surface appearance rather than psychological interpretation. The overlapping multiple figures suggest individual film frames and cinematic motion, while the work’s metallic background evokes Hollywood’s silver screen.
Barkley Hendricks was an American painter and photographer who revolutionized portraiture through his realist and post-modern paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s. “Sisters (Susan and Toni)” is a painting of two stylish women Hendricks met in Boston belongs to a series of works with dark backgrounds, against which the bright shirts and jewellery stands out.
This work and others in the exhibition are an indication of the strength of the museum’s holdings of art by black American artists of the American South.
The museum is among the largest art museum in North America for area of exhibition space and its comprehensive art collection includes ancient art, African art and American art, British sporting art, and Himalayan art. As part of their exhibit of decorative arts the museum has the largest public display of Faberge eggs outside of Russia, owning five. It is one of the first museums in the American South to be operated by state funds.
“We are proud to share the overall breadth of the VMFA collection, and in particular the importance of the Sydney and Frances Lewis collection that anchors it” says exhibition curators Sarah Powers and Alexis Assam the Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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