Continuing through May 22, 2026

“I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” –Diane Arbus, wall text 

Many of us look to art for a complex inquiry into society. For that reason and others, this carefully curated survey of forty-four works by Diane Arbus offers respite and pleasure. Titled “Sanctum Sanctorum,” it includes vintage prints and others made in the decade after her death in 1971. The title refers to the fact that almost all the images are of individuals alone in their homes, from single room occupancy hotels to expansive mansions. We are made privy to the environments Arbus’ subjects have built for themselves, places where they feel safest and most themselves. In the quotation above, Arbus explained that her superpower was her ability to notice particularities that were revealing or profound, silly or moving.

When we look at a painting from, say, Renaissance Florence, we must remember that everything the artist has included in the image is in its exact position for a reason. Things are placed to remind us of who and what were important in the fifteenth century scheme of things. When Arbus shows us a man whose feet point in the wrong direction (“The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C.,” 1961) it is because she is looking at the world with that same level of serious attention to both meaning and composition. We inhabit a society shaped by surprising, even odd, decisions that people make. The more carefully we attend to those choices, the more we learn about ourselves and how we choose to inhabit our lives.

In “Mae West in her bedroom Santa Monica” (1965), the 72-year-old actress is seen in an almost all-white environment. There is little difference in tone among her California King bed, the drapery hanging on the wall, and her frilly nightgown. The only non-white object in the room is the lamp stand, which echoes West’s voguing pose. Arbus, West and the viewer all share in the game, enjoying how West plays with the character she has created and named “Mae West.” In “Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed L.A. Ca” (1970), the popular sitcom stars are also photographed with Arbus’s camera positioned at the foot of their bed. The difference from the West image is that all of the Hollywood facade has been drained out of the Nelson’s image. They could be any well-maintained middle-aged couple. Their immaculate bedroom projects normative bourgeois serenity as much as West’s highlights her constructed persona. 

Gallery director and exhibition curator Christian Whitworth’s selections emphasize themes that run consistently through Arbus’ body of work. For example, she often photographed groupings of three. In “Triplets in their bedroom, New Jersey” (1963), the identically dressed sweet-faced girls in their early teens sit up on the central bed in a row of three. Even with those identical faces, we see three distinct emotional states: the one on the right appears a bit melancholy, the one in the middle is placid, and the one on the left is tense, her fingers nervously entwined. The diamond-themed wallpaper behind them suggests they’re sitting through a rainstorm and echoes the diamond shapes on the quilt beneath them. The window curtain has three overlapping layers. 

In an image drawn from the other end of the social spectrum we meet three elderly people seated together in “Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, NYC” (1963). The image evinces a deep emotional bond among its subjects, a trust and comfort among the two women and one man who have shared the trials and triumphs of having lived through difficult lives. This bond is another Arbus theme. Their physical status might arouse our curiosity, but it is their small gestures conveying deep human connection that hold our attention. In “Two friends at home, NYC” (1963) a large, tall woman drapes an arm around her diminutive boyfriend, who proudly smiles at the camera. In “Dominatrix embracing her client, NYC” (1970) a small middle-aged man wearing only glasses and socks clings to his lover, head buried in her shoulder, with devastating intensity. In “Husband and wife with shoes on in their cabin at a nudist camp, N.J.” (1963), a middle-aged nudist couple stare at the camera, two fingers of the husband’s left hand gently encircling his wife’s left breast signaling both familiarity and affection.

Arbus’ subjects often recline diagonally on their beds or chairs. Several pictures of supine or seated men reflect contrasting takes on masculinity, eccentricity and renown. In both “William Mack Sage of the Wilderness, NYC” (1961) and “His Serene Highness Prince Robert de Rohan Courtenay NYC” (1961) the men lying down among their accumulated possessions reveal a hoarder’s satisfaction. In the former, a bearded elderly man lies on a pallet amid several small, wheeled contraptions with shelves neatly arrayed with other found, funky treasures. Courtenay seems comfortable with himself, dressed in his dated tuxedo and top hat and posed amid decayed opulence. In “Marcello Mastroianni in his hotel room, NYC” (1962), the actor’s feet are on the floor while his left hip and elbow rest on the bed. Unlike the excesses surrounding Mack and Courtenay, Mastroianni is surrounded by the generic sterility of a high-end hotel room that is warmed by the endearing smile on his face. In a fourth celebrity portrait, a young “Norman Mailer at home, in Brooklyn N.Y.” (1963), the author is seated in a chair, man-spreading his legs so that the folds of his three-piece suit point to his crotch.

Two other portraits of artists stand out for their omission of architectural detail. Lucas Samaras is seen shirtless and seated in “Lucas Samaras, NYC” (1966). Darkly handsome, he stares into the lens, partially hidden behind one leg in front of him. The right side of his face is in shadow, echoing the right side of the photograph. He appears, if not exactly sad, then utterly vulnerable. 

In “Young Man on a Sofa (Gerard Malanga), NYC” (1966), the poet and artist poses without a shirt on a sofa, in close-up seen from the midsection up, leaning back. He has an angelic face straight out of a Pierre et Gilles fantasy. There’s a conversation going on among Malanga’s chest hair, his unibrow, and a halo of hair partially dyed blond. Most dramatically, his eyes glow as though emitting a lumen Christi, but that is nothing more than an aftereffect of batting his eyes during a lengthy exposure. With Arbus, the incidental shapes the character of the image. Like most of Arbus’ subjects, Malanga may be striving to be himself, but the image’s unearthly beauty is found via our concentrated attention. 

Finally, in “Girl in a coat lying on her bed” (1968), Arbus exposes a small but telling detail: a landscape painting set down on the floor, leaning against the wall, its image of the world left upside down. Some sixty years later, the disorder around us has grown much worse.