Parallel Play: Photographs from the Nancy Arnold Collection

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April 26 - August 24, 2025

Greider Family Gallery, Level 2

Life is short. Break the rules.
Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile. 
—Robert Doisneau

  

 The majority of works in the Palmer’s permanent collection have come to the museum as gifts. Often those works enter the collection during the patron’s lifetime, while other donors choose to gift their works as a bequest. This exhibition features a selection of photographs from the collection of Penn State alumna Nancy Arnold (Education, ’71), who has graciously identified the Palmer as the future home for her much-loved, carefully curated works.  

  

The notion of “parallel play” is borrowed from the early stages of childhood development—when children independently play alongside one another. The title also emphasizes the amusing comedy of chance encounters and unpredictable occurrences that have come to characterize the work of street photographers, photojournalists, fashion photographers, and contemporary artists during the modern era. The photographs included in Parallel Play invite us to see the commonplace in new ways and to venture into pictorial worlds characterized by visual wit and uncanny humor.  

  

We hope you’ll play along.  

  

Artists represented in the exhibition include Julie Blackmon, Robert Doisneau, Elliott Erwitt, Cig Harvey, Thurston Hopkins, O. Winston Link, Hellen van Meene, Ruth Orkin, Norman Parkinson, Priscilla Rattazzi, Marc Riboud, Roman Signer, Rodney Smith, Vee Speers, George Tice, and William Wegman. 

 

Parallel Play: Photographs from the Nancy Arnold Collection was curated by Interim Director Joyce Robinson and organized by the Palmer Museum of Art with support from the Friends of the Palmer Museum of Art Endowment.