Is the New York City Subway the Best Museum in Town?
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For better or worse, one can never be sure what there will be to see on the New York City subway. If you know just where to look, however, you can take advantage of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s impressive assemblage of artwork—a collection of nearly 400 permanent works by artists including Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, Marcel Dzama, Yoko Ono, Nick Cave, William Wegman, Roy Lichtenstein, and more. (Above is Sol LeWitt's “Whirls and Twirls (MTA),” which is on view at the Columbus Circle station in Manhattan.)
“It began with William Barclay Parsons, who was the chief engineer for the building of the 1904 IRT [line], because he knew it was going to be a difficult task to entice New Yorkers below ground at the turn of the century,” explains Sanda Bloodworth, the director of MTA Arts & Design until September of 2024.
She notes that some stations, including the now-closed City Hall stop on the 1 train, featured terracotta included in the design by architects George Lewis Heins and Christopher LaFarge. “Those were really the first pieces of art in stations,” Bloodworth says. “In 1985, MTA Arts & Design was founded—and the rest is history.”
The program focuses on installing works throughout the MTA’s system—including the Long Island Railroad and Metro North commuter rail stations—to enhance the experience of the nearly four million people who use the trains each day. There’s no one formula, Bloodworth explains, for picking an artist for a station, but the idea is that artists propose work “that will speak to people who live around or travel through the station.”
That includes everything from the cartoonish figures included in Tom Otterness’s Life Underground, which is made up of a number of small sculptures—some sitting on benches, others beneath stairs—throughout a station at West 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, or William Wegman’s “Stationary Figures,” a collection of 11 glass mosaic panels at the West 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue station featuring the artist’s beloved Weimaraners.
“Wegman’s work also has a certain amount of humor, as if the Weimaraners are standing on the platform, waiting for the train,” Bloodworth explains. “The real beauty of this program is that from the beginning, it was about our customers and it was about community, and it resulted in remarkable works that feel very right in these places.”
The collection of work within the subway system is weighty enough that there’s even a coffee-table book, Contemporary Art Underground, that celebrates and catalogues the organization’s works, from Diane Carr’s glass panels at the Broadway Station in Queens to Mickalene Thomas’s untitled mosaic at the 53rd Street Station in Brooklyn, and beyond. It serves as a reminder that subway fare includes more than a just a ride, but also a trip through a singular, stunning collection of work. “We have miles and miles of walls,” Bloodworth says. “It was just a logical decision.”
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