Stepping through Park Avenue Armory’s 67th-Street entrance you meet a hush that feels almost theatrical. A vast, palate-cleansing, undecorated foyer stretches ahead, its longest wall carrying a vinyl timeline of Diane Arbus’s 48-year life. The chronology marches from teenage experiments to the final roll of film, turning the space itself into an introductory text.
The emptiness is startling. With no barriers, the floor becomes a runway for slow walking, and each date on the wall seems to click underfoot like train-station departure boards. It is a prelude that measures time in lived moments rather than minutes.
When you turn back toward the entrance, a singular wall projection interrupts the quiet: oversized eyes - iris, lid, lash - blink in syncopated sequence. The looping montage acts as a silent metronome, reminding every visitor that looking is an active verb.
“A comprehensive body of work presented in a fractal way.”
— Curator Matthieu Humery
Cross the threshold into the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and the show unfurls. More than 450 gelatin-silver prints, the most comprehensive display of Arbus photographs ever assembled, hover on steel railings that carve the 55,000-square-foot hall into loose lanes.
The railing design allows you to peer straight through one group of images to discover five others, then watch them multiply across a mirrored wall installed at the back of the hall. The reflection doubles the artwork and the audience, creating an optical echo that suggests the exhibition could loop forever.
Arbus’s human constellation ranges from suburban children clutching toys to trapeze artists caught mid-swing, and from female impersonators dressing backstage to society couples blank-faced in their parlors. The ordinary and the unconventional hang side by side with equal weight, forcing every label of normalcy to wobble.
The prints on view are the complete set made by Arbus’s student and longtime printer Neil Selkirk. Curator Matthieu Humery and co-presenters Park Avenue Armory and LUMA have reunited the group for this North American premiere, giving Arbus’s hometown the most exhaustive look at her archive yet.
Humery calls the result “a comprehensive body of work presented in a fractal way” that lets viewers chart individual paths through the pictures. His installation encourages wandering, discovery, and the chance juxtapositions that Arbus prized in street photography.
Standing amid this lattice, you become a moving element inside her frame. A sideshow sword swallower appears beside your reflection; across the rail, a New Jersey housewife stares back with equal intensity. The room’s scale keeps shifting, as if the life Arbus recorded continues to expand even after her time on this earth.
Leave the hall and the eyes on the foyer wall resume their silent blinking. After the mirrored infinity inside, that lone projection feels newly intimate, as if Arbus is returning your gaze one last time. It is a reminder that her photographs never settle for spectacle; they look for the vulnerable seam between performer and observer, artist and audience, self and other.
“Constellation” succeeds because it enlarges that seam to room size. The show asks us not only to see what Arbus saw, but also to notice how our seeing changes the space around us. Few exhibitions offer so generous a mirror.
The exhibition runs June 5 through August 17, 2025 at the Park Avenue Armory.
Ready to collect works by Diane Arbus?
We offer end‑to‑end expertise - acquisitions, legacy planning, and collection development - so every artwork adds cultural depth and financial strength. Let's shape your collecting future.Book your consultation now!
