You are invited to spend some time at Home, the current exhibition on the walls of the much-traveled stairwell connecting the Theater Gallery to the Bancroft Lobby. Selected from the BAMPFA collections, the photographs, etchings, and drawings on view play with the notion of home-model home, mobile home, seniors' home, home gym, suburban home, urban home, ideal home, and home's antithesis, homelessness. As a setting for William Hogarth's eighteenth-century rags-to-riches narratives, as the backdrop for Larry Sultan's portraits of his aging parents, or as the subject itself in Bill Owens's series on suburbia, these depictions of the home touch on critical issues such as aging, disparity of wealth, relationships, real estate, and the ubiquitous “family values.” Whether revealing inner life or perpetuating a façade, an intimate view into a home is a revelation, like a secret disclosed.
