For a man whose life’s work has involved creating spaces for others to inhabit, it’s fitting that John Arnone’s latest set is not a Broadway stage but a university library. I AM THE SPACE WHERE I AM with John Arnone, now on view at SMU’s Hamon Arts Library, is a gesture of return. A return to Dallas, to Southern Methodist University, and to the formative roots of a Tony Award-winning career that has, until now, remained largely behind the curtain.
The show serves as both retrospective and archival debut, unveiling Arnone’s recent donation of sketches, scale models, and production notes to SMU’s Jerry Bywaters Special Collections. But to treat it as just a display of theatrical ephemera is to miss the full picture. These aren’t dusty relics. They’re blueprints of their imagination. They reveal the hand and mind of a designer who understood that the set isn’t backdrop; it’s a main character.
Arnone’s work spans more than four decades, and the exhibition offers an impressively compact glimpse into that range. There’s the gleaming energy of The Who’s Tommy, for which Arnone won his Tony in 1993, echoed here by a pinball machine that feels less like a prop and more like a sculptural intervention. There’s the timeless geometry of Vanities, the surreal classicism of Candide, and the workaday theatricality of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. If Broadway is often remembered for its stars, this exhibit makes a case for the bones beneath the glitz, the structures that make performance possible.
Molly Steed, the exhibition’s curator, brings clarity and warmth to the presentation. Rather than overwhelming viewers with trivia or theatrical name-dropping, she has foregrounded Arnone’s process: the hand-drawn lines, the built maquettes, the evidence of revision. We’re reminded that every stage begins with a sketch, and that every sketch is a risk, something imagined before it can be built, inhabited, and eventually discarded.
What emerges is a portrait of a kind of American creative persistence. Arnone’s early detour from acting to design, nudged, notably, by Garland Wright and Kathy Bates during Vanities—seems less like a Plan B and more like fate disguised as practicality. His studies at Parsons, the Art Students League, and the lesser-known but vital Lester Polakov Studio reveal a commitment to honing the craft, not just riding the wave of a breakout hit.
This isn’t a flashy show. There are no LED screens or digital walkthroughs. But like Arnone’s sets, it doesn’t need to be loud to be transformative. It lets the objects speak: sketches with worn erasure marks, models that invite close inspection, and archival materials that quietly insist on their historical and emotional value.
For SMU students and the Dallas community, I AM THE SPACE WHERE I AM offers a rare glimpse into the visual scaffolding of theater. For the broader art world, it’s a reminder that set design, too often treated as a theatrical footnote, is a serious, sculptural practice in its own right. One that deserves its place in the archive, in the gallery, and, yes, in the canon.
Arnone, ever self-deprecating, joked that he’s “not sticking around forever.” But this exhibition proves otherwise. The work stays. The sketches hold. The space he shaped lives on, not just in memory, but in the form of lines, cuts, and folds that shaped how stories were seen, and how we remember them.