Public Spaces / Private Lives
September 11 - December 7, 2025
Greider Family Gallery
Artists have long turned their attention to everyday life—capturing people’s routines, interactions, and movements in a variety of environments. Public Spaces/Private Lives presents a selection of works on paper that explore how we live, navigate, and express ourselves in both private and public settings. Spanning from the mid-1800s to the early 2000s, the exhibition includes scenes of homes, neighborhoods, rooftops, sidewalks, city streets, parks, eateries, public institutions, and transit systems mostly set in the United States, with a few works depicting Ireland and France.
Together, these images reveal the many ways individuals and communities communicate personal and cultural identities across different contexts—whether through depictions of working-class life, children at play, people in transit, or moments of solitude or self-expression. The featured artists—working across geographies and generations—capture the complexities of how we present ourselves to the public, connect with others, live under observation, encounter new and unfamiliar places, and assert our identities and presence.
In an era defined by surveillance and digital overexposure, these works invite reflection on how visibility, privacy, and identity are experienced and negotiated in everyday life. They also encourage us to reflect on the physical and social spaces we move through daily and how space may define not only our surroundings but also our feelings, actions, relationships, and memories. By emphasizing the nuanced and fluid nature of spatial boundaries, this exhibition offers a visual exploration of how individuals and communities interact with, adapt to, and shape the environments they inhabit.
Artists represented in the exhibition include Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Willie Cole, Fritz Eichenberg, Elliott Erwitt, Lewis Hine, Edward Hopper, Bill Jacobson, Sophie Rivera, Walter Rosenblum, John Sloan, and Vincent D. Smith.
Public Spaces/Private Lives was curated by Keisha Oliver, graduate assistant and doctoral candidate in art education and African American and diaspora studies, and Alicia Skeath, graduate assistant and doctoral candidate in art history.