A newly installed artwork at the 163rd Street MTA station vividly depicts flora from the Northeast and the Caribbean.
MTA Arts for Transit
Posted inArt
From Chuck Close to Sarah Sze, a Ride Through the Art of the Second Avenue Subway
New York’s Second Avenue Subway opened on January 1 after almost a century of planning, with new art installations by Chuck Close, Sarah Sze, Vik Muniz, and Jean Shin.
Posted inBooks
A New Guide to New York’s Subterranean Art
There are over 250 art projects lodged in the transit infrastructure of New York City. Some are garish or grand mosaics that cover whole subway tunnels, others you might walk by for years without recognition. A new book compiles them in a guide to city’s subterranean galleries.
Posted inArt
New Subway Art Installation Brings the Home into the Commute
Three stations on the M subway line in Ridgewood, Queens now have permanent art installations that bring moments of home into the commute.
Posted inArt
The Persistence of Time at Grand Central Terminal
For meditations on time, there are few places more frenetic with marking the seconds than Grand Central Terminal. The hundreds of thousands of people that pass through the station each day create a constant motion around the gold clock that sits calmly ticking away the moments in the center of the Grand Concourse. It’s around this idea that On Time / Grand Central at 100 was organized by MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.
Posted inArt
Nick Cave’s Equine Exercise in Puppet Magic
I first learned about Nick Cave’s work in an undergraduate puppetry class. Puppetry, like architecture and some other disciplines, is the synthesis of a myriad of techniques both artistic and mechanical, attracting sculptors, dancers, and engineers in equal number. Similarly, Cave’s 30-strong herd of horses that visited Grand Central last week in his piece HEARD•NY, presented by MTA Arts for Transit and Creative Time, as well as the “Soundsuits” for which he gained initial recognition are genre-bending works of art: they are visual and performative wonders as well as feats of construction. Cave is the director of the Graduate Fashion Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so while he may be an unwitting puppeteer, he is certainly no stranger to the intersections of beauty, functionality, and craftsmanship.
