McMullen Museum of Art · 2022
Photographing Chelsea in Transition, 1977–89
The McMullen Museum of Art presented more than eighty photographs from September 6 through December 4, 2022. Curated by Diana Larsen and Ash Anderson, the exhibition brought a newspaper archive into a museum setting without severing it from the people and city that gave it meaning.
Before the exhibition
The negatives returned to light.
When Arnie left newspaper photography, the Chelsea negatives went into one light-tight box. The photographs remained familiar to the people who had seen them in the Chelsea Record, but for decades they were almost entirely absent from the art world.
After his mother died in 2011, Arnie began looking back over the life she had supported through its leanest years. Around 2014, he opened the box and began printing again. He found that he loved the photographs as much as he had when he made them.
A chance encounter
From the Chelsea Art Walk to McMullen.
Arnie remembers sitting with his wife and dog inside a shipping container in Chelsea Square during the 2016 Chelsea Art Walk, surrounded by a small group of prints. Diana Larsen, then assistant director of the McMullen Museum of Art, stopped to look. He recalls that two pictures in particular held her attention: First Communion and Woman on Her Back Porch, Ward One. She introduced herself, handed him her card, and opened a possibility he had been pursuing for years without an answer. Arnie credits Diana Larsen with recognizing what he was trying to say through the photographs and helping open a new museum chapter for the work.
Arnie remembers a long path from the 2016 Art Walk to the museum galleries in 2022, through meetings, postponements, and the pandemic. He considered a virtual-only presentation rather than wait again; Larsen and the museum encouraged him to hold on for the physical exhibition already taking shape.
The exhibition
Made for the paper, reconsidered in the museum.
The exhibition's more than eighty digital prints were made and loaned by Arnie Jarmak. Together, they drew from an archive of more than 20,000 negatives.
The curators' view
Persistence and transformation.
The McMullen Museum presents the Chelsea photographs as a compassionate record of persistence and transformation, made without reducing residents to the crises around them. The museum situates the work within Chelsea's changing immigrant, industrial, religious, and neighborhood life, emphasizing both continuity and new arrivals.
Exhibition guide
Read the exhibition in full.
Boston College's 36-page guide brings together the exhibition's photographs, objects, labels, and curatorial essays.
Read the exhibition guide ↗
Read Ash Anderson's This Is Worth NotingBeyond the exhibition
Explore the wider archive.
Digital Commonwealth offers a broader view of the Arnold Jarmak Collection for researchers, students, and anyone interested in Chelsea's history.
Explore the full Digital Commonwealth collection ↗From the exhibition
The 2022 museum flyer.
The original visitor flyer records the exhibition's September 6 through December 4 run at the McMullen Museum of Art.
View the exhibition flyer ↗October 2, 2022
Chelsea Loves Arnie Day.
A Sunday gathering at the museum brought Chelsea friends, families, and neighbors together around the photographs and the community they preserve.
View the event flyer ↗Chelsea in transition
A guided reading of a changing city.
Six themes follow the McMullen Museum's exhibition. The final section gathers a recurring thread in Arnie's work: children and community life.
The Chelsea Record
A daily-paper practice made Jarmak a familiar figure in the city and left a public record of its routines, readers, staff, and streets.
Setting the Scene
Maps, landmarks, waterfronts, and views from above situate Chelsea's streets, shoreline, and layered history.
The Fire Brigade
Fire photographs hold the human aftermath, responders, and fragile housing conditions in view rather than treating disaster as spectacle.
Political Machinations
Election nights, petitions, officials, and local power make civic life part of the same documentary record as street portraits and work.
A City in Transition
Storefronts, housing, religious spaces, industry, and immigration trace a city changing without flattening its overlapping communities into a single story.
Faces of Chelsea
Closely observed portraits grew from relationships, familiarity, and attention to people as participants in their own city rather than anonymous subjects.
A recurring theme
Children and Community Life
Children at play, school, worship, and neighborhood gatherings register a lively public culture alongside the city's difficult material conditions.
The exhibition after the exhibition
A museum room that can still be entered.
The museum exhibition closed in December 2022, but its catalogue, labels, film, and virtual walkthrough remain online. For Arnie, that continuing life matters: the exhibition can still be entered long after the prints left the walls.