The strength of Nivola in New York: Figure in Field, running until March 15 at the Cooper Union, lies not in treasures borrowed from distant museums but in the focus on much unlikelier sites: in Brooklyn, Tottenville, Brighton Beach, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in Jamaica, Queens.

Of course, there are excellent, rarely seen models, paintings, and sketches of the Italian-American sculptor drawn from private collections, but they are not where curators Steven Hillyer and Roger Broome have placed their emphasis. Instead, it’s the hidden-in-plain-site, public nature of Nivola’s corpus that takes center stage.