The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, considered one of the first female “pop” artists who ran with the likes of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg of 1960s New York and who enjoyed a resurgence of her work after Japan chose her as its representative at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, died on 15 August, age 97. Born in Nagano, Japan, Kusama experienced visual and auditory hallucinations from a young age and began creating net and polka-dot pattern pictures to ease her mental illness — art she called “self-obliteration via the obsessive repetition and multiplication of single motifs.” At age 93, Kusama accepted a commission to paint a mural for the new MTA Grand Central Madison station — one of her final public artworks — which Miotto Mosaics Art Studios rendered into a 120-foot installation totalling approximately 875 square feet viewed by straphangers on the platform approach.

In 1957, Kusama sewed a million Japanese Yen into her coat and escaped her wealthy, dysfunctional and disapproving family, landing in New York where she began making net paintings and soft sculptures, as well as establishing herself as an avant-garde artist through her large-scale monochromatic paintings, for which she quickly gained critical attention, and her Accumulations, a series of soft phallic sculptures, like penises, with which she covered various items of furniture. “When I arrived in New York, action painting was the rage…” she said. “I wanted to be completely detached from that and start a new art movement.” In 1969, Kusama founded Kusama Enterprises, a commercial outlet selling clothing, bags, and even cars featuring her singular aesthetic: a liberal use of polka dots and dense, repeating patterns to create a sense of infinity. After her 2010 solo show at the David Zwirner gallery, Kusama’s “infinity rooms” — large mirrored expanses of light and reflection that sold out months and advance — as well as a several novels and poetry became her way of reaching the outside world. “From my very earliest memories, I have felt imprisoned by the walls of my eyes and ears and heart, upon which have been emblazoned all manner of things – nature, the universe, people and blood and flowers …” Kusama wrote. “The only way for me to elude these furtive appearances is to recreate them visually with paint, pen or pencil in an attempt to decipher what they are.”

In 1973, Kusama, impoverished, returned to Japan. Two years later, seeking treatment for her obsessive-compulsive neurosis, she admitted herself to the Seiwa psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and with the emotional security that the hospital environment afforded, she worked six days a week at a studio she created a few doors down. About this time, Kusama’s began her iconic My Eternal Soul series, which used patterns suggesting capillary webs, swarms of spermatozoa, smiling flowers and sunshines recalling her Surrealist-tinged work of the 1950s. A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe carries those themes into a continues expanse designed specifically for the Grand Central Madison. Kusama described the artwork as a gift to New York City, and included an accompanying poem asking that New Yorkers consider “Love, universe, peace and ‘owe to all mankind’” when they consider the work.

“This is Yayoi Kusama.

“I offer you a message of love, directly from my heart unto the universe.

“May you all experience the true beauty of loving humanity.

“Human life is beautiful.

“My wish is to deliver this vision, with all that is in my life, to the people of New York.”

As former MTA Arts & Design Executive Director, Linda Bloodworth said, all the artwork of the New York Cityway needed to be indestructible, even though absolutely NOTHING is indestructible — a painful lesson we learned on 11 September 2001.

For every 1,000 admirers, there is at least one miscreant, however. From practically the time she started, Bloodworth says, artists either have to get used to something happening to their work fir to adhere very closely to the list of approved materials and fabricators for their work, as well as directions for a set of processes that would ensure their work’s durability, rehabilitation potential and longevity. Sculptors and other creators work in bronze, steel or faceted glass, often where the subway goes above ground. Painters are encouraged to use mosaic.

The MTA first installed stained and faceted glass artwork — for its Arts & Design program, anyway — in 1993. The agency chose Romare Bearden’s glowing faceted-glass triptych City of Glass at the Westchester Square/East Tremont Avenue station in the Bronx. For Prospect, Marina Tsesarskaya. an industrial designer and fine artist from Kiev, took her personal experiences and overlaid them with artistic visions bypass the senses, often integrating European imagery with Asian iconography. \

For Ukrainian artist, Marina Tsersarskaya, however, a series of faceted glass compositions only made sense for the Bronx. The would naturally illustrate the four seasons with views of the Bronx from the Prospect Avenue station. With ispiration from her native of Kive, Bronx. Four Seaons works feature the intricate and delicate design of the historic railings found in the station wile featuring a distinct urban landscape of buildings, trees, and flowers.. During different times of the day, the windows filter the bright sunlight to create a transformed station environment — some day it combines the city and nature into a single artistic vision.

But not so if they panels fall victim to the ruthless ball throwers or insanely strong punchers of Bronx quiet, nights. “Sandra always said ‘as long as the wall is there, your piece is there,’ and that’s true,” said Lisa Dinhofer, who conceived “Losing My Marbles” for the 42nd Street-Port Authority Station in 2003. To a pont. In one of its lesser cover-ups to date, the MTA’s Arts & Design program has just installed millions of dollars of new art in several stations, but at some of the older, more traveled ones, it is literally hiding priceless and irreplaceable crumbling tiles under vinyl stickers — not to mention insignia perceived as confederate flags.

While Tsersarskaya never officially weighed in on the matter — her art has been spared bat beaters — when she was considering submitting, Dinhofer says, her partner told her that with 500,000 people traveling through the Port Authority every day, “more people are going to see your piece on New Year’s Eve than all of your shows put together, even after twenty years.” Because of that visibility, Dinhofer willingly takes the risk of destruction.. “It’s the subway — anything can happen. I am just really happy it’s there, and I’m more inclined to think like Milton Glaser” — that changes to the subway art are not necessarily problematic, but emblematic of the relationship between art and the city.

However, if she had the floor at an Arts & Design meeting, Dinhofer would suggest a conservation department. “Every major museum has a department of conservation, and right now, the MTA has essentially created a contemporary art museum underground. There is that Lichtenstein, which is an enamel piece, at 42nd Street and the Ralph Fasanella [oil] at 53rd Street, which I am not sure they ever got around to lighting again.”

The African-American parade tradition in all its pageantry provided the inspiration for Harlem-based artist Derek Fordjour’s Parade (2018) at 145th Street and Lenox, the northernmost stop of the 2, 3 line. Based on Fordjour’s collage maquettes and installed by Queens-based Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, lines of drum majors, majorettes, dancers, and drummers march along the platforms, accompanied by crowds of people and flags.

For this particular work, Fordjour dove into historic research on both Harlem and African-American parades that celebrated such events as the Harlem Hellfighters 369th Regiment in 1919 after World War I, through to the African-American Day Parade founded during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The annual African American Day Parade (AADP) in Harlem, for example, began in 1969 and has been celebrated usually every third Sunday in September to not only celebrate, but also to teach future generations of the resilience of Black culture. This preservation is especially important in the U.S. due to the effect of nearly 200 years of African slavery from the arrival of the first slave ship to Emancipation and beyond.

Fordjour, a native of Memphis, Tennessee — a small, yet mighty city in the heart of the Mississippi River Delta (400 miles north of New Orleans) — especially knows the grandeur of Black celebrations. Memphis, the home of the Rhythm & Blues, also hosts many vibrant, significant parades and festivals that honor Black heritage throughout the year, including the Black History Month Parade, featuring marching bands from local schools; the Southern Heritage Classic Parade, which draws thousands of attendees every fall for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) football weekend; and the Juneteenth Parades marking the end of slavery with live music, community marches, and traditional Black food.

When looking at Derek Fordjour’s original art — laminous and deeply varied — one might think of him as a bit of a magpie. Fordjour builds each of his canvas compositions using his own unique collage-based process that involves layering cardboard, newspaper, oil pastels, charcoal and other found materials. The textural surfaces that emerge from Fordjour’s studio have been described as complex — and physically engaging — as the subjects that Fordjour chooses to memorialize: athletes, performers, and others who play key roles in communal rites of passage.

Born of both “broad sociological vision and a keen awareness of the body’s vulnerability,” Fordjour’s paintings, sculptures, and installations render the fraught complexities of the Black American experience in an array of emotions, from celebration and ecstasy to melancholy and lamentation. He also investigates the tension between invisibility and “hypervisibility,” the expectations and spectacle of Black athletes, and the under-told narratives of Black performers. After briefly attending Pratt Institute, Fordjour took a break from his art education before attending and graduating from Morehouse College, Harvard University, and Hunter College with a MA in Fine Art.

In 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Fordjour created a series of artworks called “Shelter” that investigated the privileges of security as well as confinement. One painting in particular “Pall Bearers” painted George Floyd, whose funeral was paid for by boxer Floyd Mayweather, killed like a dog, leaving earth like a king in a gold casket. Fordjour followed that a year later with a solo exhibition at Pond Society in Shanghai, China, in which his paintings examined the gamification of social structures and human vulnerability through layers of the Financial Times. “The Financial Times is making an effort to differentiate itself from the pool of other newsprints with its distinctive color. The idea of individuation — the desire to distinguish oneself in the face of being stereotyped or grouped — has a tension that I identify with.”

Fordjour will be the subject of a forthcoming 2027 Phaidon monograph. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; the Royal Collection, United Kingdom; and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Described by the Museum of Modern Art as “a rebel with a cause,” whose art and political engagement took the path of “maximum resistance,” Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) dedicated her life to making art about the Black experience. A Harlem native who attended university, created, and exhibited for nearly seven decades in her home neighborhood, Ringgold was edged out of the institutional art world until the early 21st-century.

Now celebrated around the world for her series of story quilts, children’s books, paintings and sculpture, Ringgold nonetheless built her own movement first. When the MTA came calling for art that would represent the 125th street neighbourhood, Ringgold — still considered relatively obscure — highlighted the work of her own heroes in Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines (Downtown and Uptown, a story quilt on the wall, if you will. “(Ringgold) came of age just after the Harlem Renaissance, at a time when the neighborhood still pulsed with Black cultural life,” said Daniel Fuller, an arts writer in Atlanta. “The women and men who shaped these artistic and intellectual reawakenings were stars, and Ringgold revered them. For the 2 and 3 subway lines, she memorialized them in mosaic, presenting her memories of these icons—and of a Harlem that helped shape her.”

Ringgold borrowed the mosaic’s title from the 1939 Lionel Hampton song Flying Home, a jazz classic. According to urban legend, while touring with Benny Goodman, Hampton had to take his first flight. To calm his nerves, he began whistling a melody while waiting for takeoff. When Goodman asked about his tune, Hampton said, “Flying Home.” Ringgold’s figures fly home in her mosaic — soaring above Harlem’s landmarks, suspended in time.

Composed of ten panels—five on the Uptown platform and five on the Downtown side — the work begins with The Performers, in which Ringgold depicts a constellation of celebrated flyers: Dinah Washington, Florence Mills, Ralph Cooper, Billie Holiday, and the American doo-wap group, the Ink Spots, sailing over the Apollo Theater — the venue that launched the careers of countless artists. The Artists features Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden with a paintbrush in hand, Norman Lewis, and Aaron Douglas sailing over The Studio Museum in Harlem. The Writers has literary luminaries Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston hovering over The Schomburg Center — one of the most vital institutions preserving the experiences of people of African descent.

Leaders and Influencers features NAACP officials like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset, who provided not only political leadership but also aesthetic and financial support to Black artists and writers. Mary McLeod Bethune joins them, the educator and founder of the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Lastly, The Athletes showcases Joe Lewis and Sugar Ray Robinson sailing over Yankee Stadium and Jessie Owen floating over the Berlin stadium. “I wanted to share those memories, to give the community — and others just passing through — a glimpse of all the wonderful people who were part of Harlem,” Ringgold said. “I wanted them to realize what Harlem has produced and inspired.”

Eventually, however, Ringgold married her second husband Burdette “Birdie” Ringgold, whom she married in 1962, and settled in Englewood, New Jersey. Throughout the 1970s, Ringgold lectured at Pratt Institute and eventually the University of California, San Diego until 2002, when she retired from teaching. In 1995, Ringgold published her first autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, detailing her journey as an artist and life events to her marriages and children to her professional career and accomplishments as an artist. From her work on the MTA Arts & Design, Ringgold launched the Anyone Can Fly Foundation to expand the art establishment’s canon to include artists of the African Diaspora and to promote the Great Masters of African-American art. She died at her home in 2024, age 93.

110th Street: Message from Malcolm (1998), Maren Hassenger Large​ly a textile and sculpture artist, Maren Hassinger crafted some maquettes for this set of Malcolm X​-quotation​ mosaics about Black power and Black brotherhood that line the stairway walls at the entrance. ​”Basically, I wanted to make something that behaved very physically with the site while also honoring the memory of Malcolm X...​”

Among the quotations Hessinger picked: ​”I believe in a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality,” and, “Nobody’s going to straighten out Harlem but us.” The upright wall within the station contains images/symbols of accomplishment and aptitude with Malcolm’s words on the reverse side. “Malcolm X believed that we as African Americans have the power to determine our destinies. This station is a reminder of that truth,” Hassinger said.

Heins & LaFarge Cartouches, Original 28

While Columbia’s campus lay empty one winter break, the MTA and the university’s department of community affairs joined forces to give the 116th Street subway station a facelift — a polish and shine of the original Heins & LaFarge cartouches of Alma Mater and her ornate torch. The clean-up covered four stations — 103rd through 125th, but when MTA officials stated they were skint on the $60 mil reno, Columbia chipped in $1 mil. Slated by Arts & Design for artwork to complement the decorative tiles — a small bronze inlaid subway train track surrounded by sepia-toned photographs of Morningside Heights — the neighbourhood voted it down, afraid it would alter the original tile work of the landmarked station.

116th STREET: Milton’s Playhouse (uptown); The Movers and Shakers (downtown) (1999), Vincent DaCosta Smith

Vincent Smith (1929-2003), a Brooklyn native who — inspired by Cezanne — cast off his penchant for hopping trains to paint full time in 1953, highlights both Harlem’s entertainment leaders and its political figures in Milton’s Playhouse (uptown); as well as The Movers and Shakers (downtown).

Rendered in paint and immortalized in mosaic, Milton’s Playhouse showcases the art and jazz music created during the Harlem Renaissance against a background of African and Caribbean yellows, blues, and greens. The Movers and Shakers, on the opposite side, portrays sixteen Harlem visionaries in front of important places in their careers, including Langston Hughes before the National Black Theater; Zora Neale Hurston and Alvin Ailey at the Studio Museum; W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X in front of the Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ (once known as Faith Temple).

Before earning his art degree at age 50, Smith, a high school dropout, travelled the country, worked on the railroad, and served in the army. Smith painted mostly abstract figures against darkly patterned backgrounds; this MTA commission marked a departure for the artist.

Ironically, Columbus Circle is the only station that features Grueby Faience plaques of “the great navigator’s caravel” — most likely the Santa Maria — placed on corners, albeit below a highly contested statue of Christopher Columbus himself. Heins & LaFarge appreciated expensive touches at their stations, and 59th Street doesn’t disappoint with cartouches from Grueby Faience by ceramicist William Henry Grueby and architect-designer William Graves. Inspired by the matte glazes of French pottery and simplicity of Japanese ceramics both had seen at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the pair produced award-winning glazed architectural terra cotta and faience tiles for decorative construction. Private agencies listed the building on the National Register of Historic Places to preserve the tiles during the nearby Hearst Tower’s construction in 2004.

Just seven blcoks up the street, he station at 66th Street — one of the Original 28 — also used Heins & LaFarge’s Beaux Arts signage to help more than 7,000 residents from one of the largest African-American communities, including veterans from the Spanish American War, pass through the station to visit the jazz clubs and cafes of San Juan Hill (now part of Central Park). Then Lincoln Center came along — part of the "Lincoln Square Renewal Project,” or Robert Moses' 1950s-60s urban rehabilitation.

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: Underground Art: The People’s Guide to the Works of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

New York in the early 1900s: the Gilded Age, the Robber Barons, the tenements, the gangs, the Scientific Americans and the age of invention and industrialisation. Its inhabitants saw their city as a place where anything could happen, from the Woolworth building — one of the first city skyscrapers — to the pneumatic tube (the precursor to the subway), as well as Central Park and Railroads — consolidated under Cornelius Vanderbilt brought people, profits, and lots of pollution. The city aimed to keep soot-belching steam engines above 42nd Street so to coordinate their services (and save money), they agreed to share a new transit hub. Voila! The original Grand Central depot of 1871 satisfied everything.

Although splendid for the 19th Century trains, the original eventually needed a retrofit. Sketched out by two architectural firms and completed over ten years, on 2 February 1913, Grand Central Terminal was opened with passengers boarding the first train at one minute past midnight. Within 16 hours of its opening, an estimated 150,000 people had passed through the Beaux Arts wonder, under the astrological mural of the Mediterranean winter sky, complete with 2500 and dozens of constellations — as seen from God’s point of view — past the 10 gold chandeliers, each holding 110 light bulbs, as well as the Guastavino tiles and the imposing sculptures of Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva on top of the 42nd Street façade. Quite possibly the most desired commission of the MTA Arts & Design program, Grand Central also boasts several installations, including in the new Penn Station Extension.

A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe (2022) by Yayoi Kusama

For the new Grand Central terminal station, one-time New Yorker Yayoi Kusama created A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe (2022), a riff of her “pop” and humorous My Eternal Soul series of paintings and immersive rooms. She has said Grand Central inspired many different characters coming and going. Inspired at her studio at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo and fabricated by Queens-based, Miotto Mosaics Art Studios, the vibrant, colorful composition depicts a bright cosmic party, with Kusama’s signature pumpkins and smiling sun faces floating alongside amoebas and abstract forms. In true Kusama form, the artist accompanied her 120-foot wide, seven-foot high, 875-square-foot glass mosaic with a poem:

This is Yayoi Kusama./I offer you a message of love, directly from my heart unto the universe./May you all experience the true beauty of loving humanity./Human life is beautiful./My wish is to deliver this vision, with all that is in my life, to the people of New York.

I dreamed a world and called it Love (2020) by Jim Hodges

Nestled above the busiest entrance at Grand Central-42 St., Jim Hodges' I dreamed a world and called it Love (2020) reflects straphangers as they ascend or descend to the trains — a dynamic public installation. No two visits are the same. Composed of more than 5,000 pieces of glass in more than 70 different colors, Hodges’ masterpiece features sparkling deep blues to reference the Main Concourse's celestial ceiling, followed by kaleidoscopic bursts framed by a black granite backdrop. To Hodges, camouflage represents nature; shapes appear fluid and the faceted glass has a swirling visual dynamism that mimics the pulsating energy of the station itself. Hodges, a native of Washington State, lives and works in New York. His desire for I dreamed a world and called it Love (2020) “was to rise to the occasion of the historic context of Grand Central Terminal and celebrate the people who give New York its identity for many years to come.”

As Above, So Below (1998) by Ellen Driscoll

As the historic ceiling in Grand Central Terminal's main concourse shows the universe's constellations, Ellen Driscoll's As Above, So Below (1998) shows commuters the myths, beings, and deities of the underworld. The scenes of As Above, So Below (1998) bring to life ancient tales of the interconnectedness between the heavens and earth. Designed to showcase the diversity of New York, Driscoll altered them to take on the attributes of mythical figures. Comprised of thirteen large mosaic, glass and bronze murals and reliefs installed in the northern passageways at 45th, 47th and 48th streets, the work forms a visual anthology of ancient and modern cosmological stories connecting the daily commute to global time travel; its subjects include Aboriginal and Celtic narratives, the Egyptian goddess Nut, Persephone, Sisyphus, Einstein, and a recurrent train traveling a circular path. Driscoll, whose work hangs in the Met and the Whitney, chose — with her entry — to remind commuters of their spiritual and worldly past while they hurry through the station trying to make it to work on time or jump on the trains home.

River Light; The Presence; The Spring; The Sound; The Water’s Way (2022) by Kiki Smith

Since her arrival on the New York art scene, Kiki Smith has made her name though multidisciplinary work that explores embodiment and nature. To adorn the Grand Central Madison extension, Smith created five individual mosaics collectively called: River Light; The Presence; The Spring; The Sound; The Water's Way (2022). Totaling over 1,400 square feet, Mayer of Munich fabricated Smith's original photographs into colored stone. The German-born Smith, whose 1980s figurative work confronted controversial topics, such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, recently started exploring the human condition in relationship to nature. The Presence, a single deer standing among waving wheat, stars and tall grass, shows off — in vibrant color — Smith's new direction. The Spring, depicting four wild turkeys in their natural habitat, bring the "flora and fauna" of Long Island — most of the trains' ultimate destination — into the bright marble terminal. The Sound, the second of three of Smith's water-inspired pieces, features a blue sea overshadowed by storm clouds. The Water's Way, the last of Smith's mosaics in the new terminal, portrays a recognizable yet unnamed beach on Long Island. In 2012, Smith received the U.S. State Department Medal of Arts from former New York Senator Hillary Clinton and her work adorns consulates in Istanbul and Mumbai.

Grand Central: Arches, Towers, Pyramids (2000/2020) by Jackie Ferrera

Continuing in the tradition of Squire Vickers' identifying the city below the city, Jackie Ferrera created Grand Central: Arches, Towers, Pyramids (2000/2020) — originally conceived as a skyline for Grand Central Terminal’s underground passageways and waiting areas. When the Vanderbilt Extension and One Vanderbilt was announced in 2012, Ferrera, then 83, agreed to span the new area and wrap new stairs from the mezzanine. Ferrera, a Detroit native who died of physician-assisted suicide in Basel in October 2025 age 95, thought of her subway work as pieces of a mathematical puzzle. "This sequence of stripe/image is calculated," she told the MTA It can be seen as images on a strip of film, or a line of faces framed in the windows of a passing train."

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway…

is well underway now, to be published by Quarto in Fall 2026. The backstory: from 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway

A new ritual for 2026 could be a Roman-ceremonial stop to 137th Street and City College — the first publicly funded university in New York. The Heins & LaFarge-and Squire-Vickers-designed station is the second to last of the original 28 stations of the subway. Heins & LaFarge saw to the wainscotting and cartouches decorated with an image of Janus, the Roman god who presided over the beginning and ending of conflict — hence war and peace — which relates to the motto of the City College of New York, located just east of the station: Respice, Adspice, Prospice in Latin, which means Look behind, look here, look ahead (the three provinces of scholarship).

In designing the 1907 campus for the City College at Amsterdam Avenue and 138th Street, the architect George B. Post wanted to counter McKim, Mead & White’s lofty, imperial Roman-style Columbia College and the Renaissance-esque campus for New York University’s Bronx branch (now Bronx Community College). Post chose a rugged Gothic style in Manhattan schist, set off with brilliant white terra cotta for the campus. To complement to simplicity of the architecture of the campus buildings, after Heins & LaFarge departed the subway scene, Vickers pared back the grandiosity, thus the salmon-and-black Arts and Crafts mosaic name tiles.

Happy New Year! Posts forthcoming as the book goes into production.

Located underneath the famed Winter Garden Theater, Heins & LaFarge used the same type font and amphora theme first seen at Astor Place at 50th Street before Vickers and subsequent architects had to replace it with Arts and Crafts design to keep costs down. Like Astor, the station also includes a more recent work of art, Liliana Porter’s Alice: the Way Out (1994), which features silhouetted figures portraying characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The scenes are purposefully vague, allowing straphangers’ imagination fill in the details.

Porter wanted simple, yet engaging works that would “echo the stagecraft found in the Broadway theaters” nearby. The artist evokes the idea of the theatrical and playfully connects it with the experience of being underground, as was Alice during her adventures. Playing on the theme of what lies beneath or “behind the curtain” Porter shows Alice pulling back a drape to reveal the drama.

Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires and studied printmaking there before moving to New York in 1964, where she cofounded the New York Graphic Workshop with artists Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. Now 84, she has worked in a variety of media including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, installation, as well as theater. Porter is known for her “theatrical vignettes” — characters that are inanimate objects, including miniatures, toys and figurines, which she portrays in a variety of interactions. Porter has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, as well as three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships.

Lastly, the 50th Street station holds a now disused newsstand which once sold the MetroCard — retiring on New Year’s Eve. In January 1994, the MTA announced they had run out of tokens and would introduce a flimsy piece of plastic to run through a reader rather than slip in a slot. Sometimes they worked the first time; other days, it took several swipes to make it through the turnstile. But still, the MetroCard was “a lot lighter than carrying a lot of tokens,” according to one commuted who talked to the New York Times and caused fewer “holes in my pocket.” Nonetheless, the MTA still had to teach people how to use the MetroCard, and only eight percent of five million daily subway riders used it two years later. But a number of other cities adapted a tap-and-go system and New York’s MTA installed the first OMNY readers in 2019. By the end of 2020, the entire city had OMNY readers — 94 percent of subway riders now tap their credit cards, rather than buy a MetroCard. On 31 December the New York City subway will stop selling the MetroCard.

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

It’s been said by several highbrow art publications that Times Square can’t be “intellectualized, it has to be felt.” The painter, photographer and curator Jane Dickson has lived with a fascination of Times Square for four decades — her legacy is intertwined with this famous and frenetic zone of Manhattan. Dickson’s 2008 mosaic Revelers cemented her legacy in the Times Square she both loved and hated.

Rising to prominence in the late 70s, early 1980s downtown New York art world — the countercultural punk scene — Dickson wound up at the helm of the first electronic billboard in Times Square. Hired by the same company that dropped the ball on New Year’s Eve, she used the opportunity to further the careers of friends Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and David Hammons. But when not promoting others, in Revelers (2008), Jane Dickson documenting this tradition with 70 expressive life-size figures in motion: walking, gesturing, linking arms, or dancing; all enjoying themselves and each other's company.

“I started doing Revelers because Times Square is under siege at New Year’s Eve. We lived on the corner of 43rd and 8th, but on the East Side, so we were always within the Times Square lockdown zone. You were either out of there by 5 pm on New Year’s Eve, and you didn’t come back until the next morning, or you were hunkered down,” Dickson told Art Papers magazine in 2018. Ironically, Dickson paid homage to the people she both loved and hated in Revelers — retributive justice. “I don’t really like drunken mobs, and back in the 90s it was dangerous. People got mugged a lot. All the stores would put up plywood over their windows, and nothing was open. I always tried to not be there on New Year’s.

“The year I was pregnant with my daughter, they thought I was going to have a miscarriage [and I couldn’t travel], so by nine pm I had a pillow over my head because people start tooting those horns at six. As soon as I put a pillow over my head I thought, “I hate this, and I make good work about things I hate.” Dickson left her apartment, walked to Times square and took lots of photos of that New Year’s Eve. She also showed her Revelers paintings all over the city in 1990.”

The early paintings were bleak, according to Dickson. They’re all monochrome; light and dark on an army green or brown. “I made these paintings, and I was, like, they’re not going to be about color. They’re just light and dark, because I have a babysitter for another 45 minutes; I’m just going to knock it in.” When it came time to do the MTA mosaics, Dickson had conquered cancer didn’t want to be “morose” any longer. “There’s nothing like having to fight for your life… I was designing [the mosaics] after the London subway bombings, and I didn’t want to freak people out… I describe the mosaics as cheerful fellow travelers. Maybe I’m Pollyanna-ish. I’m trying to do something to lighten it up.” Dickson enlisted students, her children and friends to pose, but when she looked at the photos, everyone was in black, so Dickson made up the colors using Murano glass — and the hues of her children’s paints.

“I feel like my real art began when I thought, ‘I’m not doing studies anymore, I’m only going to make work about things that I know something about, and I know a lot about Times Square.’ Times Square: it’s attractive, and it’s horrifying, but it’s intriguing, and at that point it was extremely raw,” Dickson said. “That was around the time the city had gone bankrupt, and really, all the people who had power had moved to the suburbs, and they were, like, ‘Let’s just let it sink in on itself, and it will all just go down some drain.’ I thought, ‘I want to get in there, even if it’s really messed up. This is the present and the future.’”

The modern day story of Persephone the Greek queen of the underworld, Jack Beal’s The Return of Spring (2001)/The Onset of Winter (2005) hangs just beyond the Arts and Crafts numerals and “TS” letters and other symbols by Squire J. Vickers. In The Onset of Winter (2005) Persephone Beal, an eccentric Southerner raised in Richmond, Virginia, studied biology at the College of William and Mary before attending the Art Institute of Chicago painted himself as Poseidon, god of earthquakes, in the guise of a workman wielding a jackhammer — or“Jack” hammer.

In a New York film industry update of The Onset of Winter (2005), a crowded sidewalk of onlookers and a film crew watch as Persephone fulfills her agreement to return to the underworld, thus signaling the start of the autumn and winter seasons. She “twists in agony at the top of the stairs, knowing that she must go but wishing that she could stay,” Beal explained. “The event is being filmed with a group of spectators, who certainly would have materialized.”

With a tight deadline on delivering the finished The Return of Spring for the mosaic fabrication, Beal posed his friends for the artwork — even his dog Scoo2er made the cut for a model. In his studio, Beal created a gigantic oil painting, which he shipped to the Travisanutto, Italy Workshop of Queens-based Miotto Mosaics, where expert craftsmen translated the painted image an array of small glass tiles. Despite the speed of the installation — three days after September 11, 2001 — Beal had worked for about 10 years from pose to painting to a patchwork of stone, as fabricators scanned photographs and sent to Beal for recommended adjustments. Beal traveled to Italy to approve the completed mural. Considered a symbol of hope during one of New York’s darkest autumns, Beal was subsequently commissioned to create a companion mural, The Onset of Winter.

Beal had been one of the first artists to settle in Soho, New York during the city’s collapse and bankruptcy. In 1974, the United States General Services Administration commissioned Beal to produce a series of murals, The History of Labor in America, The 18th Century: Settlement for the U.S. Department of Labor headquarters in Washington D.C. Beal has work in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery in Washington, DC, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Lastly, there’s a reason the MTA is thrifty these days. It is broke. But is that a reason to let it fall apart tile-by-tile?

In one of its lesser cover-ups to date, the MTA’s Arts & Design program has just installed millions of dollars of new art in several stations, but at some of the older, more traveled ones, it is literally hiding priceless and irreplaceable crumbling tiles under vinyl stickers — not to mention insignia perceived as confederate flags.

But who would notice at one of the most decorated stations —Times Square — amid all the tourist hubbub? Under former MTA Arts and Design Executive Director, Linda Bloodworth, the agency undertook a mad spending spree that saw millions of dollars spent in new installations since the pandemic ended in 2022. Bloodworth fobbed off responsibility for restoring the vintage art installed by Heins & LaFarge and Squire Vickers to the State of New York. But doesn’t art restoration fall under a percent for art program? No. Restoration falls under the jurisdiction of Capital Program and the State Historic Preservation Office,” Bloodworth said. In other words, the governor’s office. “The NYC Transit cleaning department is responsible during the operational life of a station — Percent for Art is the only time we can touch it.”

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

Let’s just face it, if New Yorkers want to experience nature, they are going to either visit upstate (meaning anything above the Bronx) or bicycle along the West Side highway. They will not walk down several long flights of stairs underground, push through a turnstile and wait around two minutes, or sometimes five, or late at night twenty, for a subway train and admire the subway tiles.

But the MTA doesn’t want you to know this… or the train times. Yes, the subway is full of nature. Plenty of nature five stories underground, it implies with all of the art motifs about animals and flowers and birds and such. Yeah, come on down, the art beckons. Come and see renderings of nature. Thus we have When the Animals Speak… (1998), the artist Elizabeth Grajales’ highly detailed mosaics showing wild beasts in a pastoral setting, reminiscent of 19th-century oil paintings. At one end of the platform, a pair of lions happily co-exist with birds along the Hudson River (the cliffs are the New Jersey Palisades). In the mosaic seen at the other end, a bear contentedly watches a doe and her young.

When choosing artists for the subway, the MTA Arts & Design — or at least under former director Sandra Bloodworth — usually looked for native New Yorkers to create the works that would become the supposedly indestructible art rendered in usually mosaic, sometimes steel, occasionally fiberglass. Elizabeth Grajales was born in Brooklyn, New York and first earned a bachelors in painting and drawing from Arizona State University where she developed a love of nature. She then studied landscape architecture City College of New York before going on to practice ceramics at Parsons School of Art. After receiving public art commissions from 1992 to 2000 throughout NYC, Grajales went on to become a public art project manager for the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture Public Art Program.

As a practicing artist, Grajales’ work has always been about nature. The second installment of her work at Penn Station, A Bird’s Life, consist of complimentary panels along the train tracks showing red-winged blackbirds, a migratory bird found in large numbers along the parks and rivers of New York. “As a child on shopping trips,” notes Grajales, “I wanted to give people something cheerful but also calming — a refuge in the city.” Designed to compliment the Squire Vickers’ Art & Crafts signs, A Bird’s Life nonetheless comes from “a vision from my dream world…” Grajales said of her work. “[They] represent the conflict in our environment between nature and man’s tools of destruction,”

Grajales, when working on her public art bird installations in Brooklyn, became a bit of a avian fanatic. One day in Prospect Park, she found 25 white pigeons abandoned in and ultimately four birds, which moved in with Grajales. But one flew the coop. Grajales posted 200 “Missing” fliers on the tree-lined streets of Park Slope. “I’ve been keeping a log (of the calls from the neighbors),” Grajales told the New York Times in 2000. “Tuesday morning someone called and said, ‘I think I saw your pigeon on Union and Fourth Avenue. Then someone from the zoo called and said a lot of pigeons come here for the feed.” One caller offered to set traps on his roof. Another told her that in Eastern religions, pigeons transport souls to the other world, the Times reported.

Grajales never found her lost bird, which she had been training to recognize its home. But the bird showed up in other work around the city, including P.S. 92, which has Who Else Shares Our World? an installation of over two hundred ceramic relief tiles of endangered species such as elephants, manatees, lemurs and the American bald eagle. But Grajales also included pigeons and crows along the columns of the school's corridors, as well as above the classroom entrances.

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

The 14th street subway station — not one of the Original 28, but among the city’s oldest — has needed a bit of a facelift for quite a long time, its Squire Vickers-designed walls caked in century-old brake dust, among other New York subway gross stuff. However, the preservation of these classic stations does not fall under the remit of the MTA Arts & Design program. Nope. Any sort of clean up of this classic, beautiful and practical art is the responsibility of the state government, about three hours upstate in Albany.

Approximately 131,000 straphangers per day use the 14th Street Station, which runs either down the West Side on the red line or through a walkway to the PATH train to New Jersey or to the L train across Brooklyn. Bloodworth believed that any new art should stand out to the eye of the beholder — or make an often long and dreaded underground journey a little bit brighter. So what did the MTA do during its recently completed reno? It installed new art, Vickers be damned.

But what impressive art did recently retired director of MTA Arts & Design division, Sandra Bloodworth, choose. Wild Things, a series of six ornithologic mosaics designed by artist Fred Tomaselli and installed by mosaic masters Mayer of Munich, is supposed to evoke some New York City’s natural habitat beneath the surface. And yes, New York does have other wildlife beyond the ropes of the nearby meat-packing district bars, restaurants and clubs.

Tomaselli, a Brooklyn-based artist and an avid birder, reached back into his own tactile bird-watching experiences to create a vibrant and chaotic, yet controlled, portrayal of the city’s majestic creatures of flight. Recently fascinated by the plight of Flaco, a male Eurasian eagle owl that escaped the Central Park Zoo in February 2023, subway goers will appreciate Wild Things as an apropos extension of their love of gliding creatures besides “flying rats” (otherwise known as pigeons) — as some scornful people like to call them. The work focuses on avian species that call New York City their home, including woodpeckers, cardinals, orioles and falcons.

The intricate compositions, based on the artist’s paintings and draftsmanship, comprise a collage of vibrant traditional smalti glass — highly valued molten glass that has been cooled and hand-cut into uneven tesserae — custom-made buttons and printed glass. The artwork, with additional panels inside the 14th Street-6th Avenue station, adds more than 680 square feet of mosaic throughout the complex. Tomaselli’s imagined world appear in scenes that include: “orioles mobbing a falcon, an owl's gaze, a cosmic cardinal, woodpecker with sonic swirls, a bright sky full of abstract clouds in blue hues, and earth represented by the flaming red petals of a dahlia,” according to the MTA Arts & Design. A variety of fabrication technique capture the artist’s original collaged and painted images in glass and ceramic mosaic

“Wild Things” is Tomaselli's first mosaic project for MTA Arts & Design, as well as his first permanent public artwork in Manhattan. A native of Santa Monica, California, Tomaselli, 68, is an interesting choice for the MTA, although he is highly regarded by gallerists all over the world, including the famous White Cube in London. His highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combine an array of such items as medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants, alongside images cut from books and magazines. After creating an explosion of color over a theme found in art history, he will paint, glaze, varnish and finally seal the entire work in clear epoxy resin.

“I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work,” Tomaselli has said. “In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it.

“I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don’t have a radical agenda.”

The new Tomaselli work is located in the 14th Street-7th Avenue ​​​station at the stairs to Uptown and Downtown platforms, in the 14th Street-6th Avenue ​​​station Uptown & Queens mezzanine, and in the passage connecting to 6th Avenue alongside the renovated ADA ramp.

Back to the Old Vickers…

Despite the dazzling new Tomasettis, Vickers’ practical style deserves some preservation. This particular detail lines the 2, 3 Red Line’s walls. It depicts the unction of Broadway and the Bowery Road in 1828 by — the sites of 19th century furniture makers Johnson & Faulkner and Ferguson Bros. The motifs provide a clear example of Vickers’ own painterly life, which often bled into his subway art. Elsewhere, the Vickers’ signs and other subway tiles are caked in dirt.

Coming Soon (Quarto, 2026): The People’s Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, for a guidebook: 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by Quarto in London. More information forthcoming.

Inside the Christopher St./Stonewall station, once known as Christopher Street/Sheridan Square (changed by order of the New York State Legislature in 2023) straphangers will find two artistic installations, one classic to coincide with its 1918 opening, and the other more modern — but still reflective of the neighborhood’s history.

The architects of the first subway system, known as the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit Company), George Heins and Christopher Grant Lafarge, believed that the designs of the original 28 stations — of which Christopher Street/Sheridan Square is NOT a part — should be distinct from one another and reflect their neighborhoods. The use of decorative elements rather than text alone resulted in easier navigation for all riders, including immigrants and tourists for whom English was not their first language.

Squire Vickers — who took over from Heins & LaFarge and became the system’s chief architect for more than three decades (1906-1942) — oversaw the design of more stations than any other individual. He left his mark with signature Arts and Crafts tile station plaques, and around 1911, Vickers abandoned neighbourhood symbols but elaborated on city scenes which he took from historic prints. He also believed it was more practical if the designs were flatter — less dust gathered than on their Beaux Arts predecessors.

Vickers also thought “the irregularity is quite necessary for (the subway stations); if it was regular the charm would be lost”. Vickers abandoned neighbourhood symbols but elaborated on city scenes which he took from historic prints: a tavern on Canal Street, Peter Stuyvesant’s house on Whitehall Street and the Brooklyn Heights waterfront on Clark Street. At Christopher Street, the Vickers tile mural was based on the House of Detention, the first women’s prison in in New York City. Built next to the old courthouse on West 10th Street, it lasted from 1877 to 1927 when it was demolished to make way for the first — and probably only — Art Deco prison in America.

Under the Vickers tiles, subway aficionados will find a series of 12 mosaics depicting important moments in Greenwich Village history. Lee Brozgol’s series The Greenwich Village Murals (1994) — created with children from nearby P.S. 41 — portray 40 significant people of Lower Manhattan, split up into four groups: Founders, Providers, Bohemians, and Rebels. A key next to the mosaic lists the figures, and they include such leading Americans as Lithuanian-born anarchist revolutionary and writer.Emma Goldman, photograher and gallery owener Alfred Stieglitz and American journalist, poet, and communist activist John Reed who covered Russia’s October Revolution and wrote the 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World.

Although Brozgol originally intended for each panel to depict one famous person, he revised his vision realizing that the “village is so rich in amazing characters who shaped America that picking only twelve was impossible.” Brozgold and his students — nine fifth and sixth graders — found space for some forty people, bending time to group them together.

Lee Brozgol (1941 – 2021) was a pioneering artist and clinical social worker who came from Chicago and became integral to the Lower East Side community in the mid-1960s. Brozgol’s lifelong mission was to explore human identity and how to portray it. When not creating public art, Brozgol made hand-crafted ceramics, which allowed him to focus on personal detail, individual expression and collaboration. His work has been shown at Grand Central Station, The Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, the Paine Weber Gallery and a retrospective at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

It has been suggested several times to nominate the entire subway system to the National Register for Historic Places, according to the New York Times. “Preservationists still bemoan Philip Johnson's makeover of the 49th Street station, blanketed with shiny orange tiles in 1975, as well as the demolition of the Bowling Green station starting in 1972, when huge red tiles replaced elegant mosaic name panels and neo-classical designs by Heins and LaFarge, as well as Vickers. While the care and upkeep of the newer art falls under the MTA Art & Design, the original work is under the remit of the State of New York, which operates the subway.

Coming Soon: A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by a publisher in London. More information forthcoming.

As the railroads boomed across the nation, mid-19th- century New York City had a number of above-ground railways used mostly for freight transport, as well as for taking city workers to the suburbs sprouting up on Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1896, several financiers formed the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) to extend express train service into Upper Manhattan and Brooklyn, simplify the Alphabet soup of trains coming in-and-out of the city. and build more stations. The city granted the contracts to two privately owned systems, the original subway firm, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), and the BRT. Work soon began on the Red Line.

By that time, George Lewis Heins had died, and Christopher Grant Lafarge had given up the subway project to focus on Long Island commissions for such tycoons as J. Pierpont Morgan. The IRT hired Squire J. Vickers, a painter-turned-architect and “underground Renaissance man,” to continue the work of designing a user-friendly subway. An eccentric who kept his artistic life alive while working steadily on the subway, Vickers’ taste in colors and geometric design can still be seen throughout the system.

But for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons, Vickers pushed the subway administrators toward a more pared- down, modern path than his Beaux-Arts predecessors. He synthesised elements of the Arts and Crafts movement — a British reaction to mechanization — and the austerity of the Machine Age to create a “just-the-facts” style, using sans-serif type and mosaic. “How grateful to the eye is the wall surface unbroken by panelling, noxious ornament or the misplaced string course, decorated, if you like, inlaid with color, but unbroken,” Vickers once wrote. Instead of disguising the steel and concrete structure of the subway, Vickers celebrated the subway’s underlying industrial character.

The Red Line stretches all the way from upper Manhattan to central Brooklyn and features a wide variety of media to tell the stories of all the neighborhoods through which it runs. Deborah Brown‘s Platform Diving (1994) features seven, whimsical glass mosaics of aquatic creatures that act like humans as they wait for the train to arrive at their underwater station. A beluga whale slides behind a commuter to read the newspaper headlines; a manatee waits patiently for a train seen approaching in the tunnel; turtles dive off a subway platform in the title piece of the series. “I wanted to explore the analogy between subway travel and the movement of our fellow creatures through their natural environment,” Brown said. The mosaics are offset by the original Arts & Crafts functional lettering installed by Squire Vickers.

"Underwater creatures navigate a complex spatial array of undersea passageways, much as we manuever through our own manmade systems,” Brown said. “I thought it would be provocative to portray them in a part of our world most closely resembling their own, but involved in activities familiar to us.”

Coming Soon: A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by a publisher in London. More information forthcoming.

Even entering the Wall Street Green Line subway station on Lower Broadway near Trinity Church can feel like traveling to 1904 in a time machine. First, the cast iron, curved hoods covering the stairwell have an elaborate leaf pattern, and match with the deep green lamp posts nearby.

Mostly designed by Heins & Lafarge, the Wall Street station features, among other things, fare control areas at platform level, including a disused oak token booth, the last of its kind in the New York Subway system. Beneath the street stairs leading to Wall Street are wooden doorways that formerly led to men's and women's restrooms, with corresponding marble lintels.

Meanwhile, the walls along the platforms consist of a pink marble wainscoting and divided at 15-foot intervals by pink marble pilasters, each topped by blue-and-green tile plaques, which contain the letter “W” surrounded by a Greek key carving. Above these “W” plaques are faiences that depict a New Amsterdam step-gabled house with the palisade wall in front of it — a reference to the namesake of Wall Street. The original interiors were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In addition to collecting, the MTA’s Arts + Design division — the bureau tasked with decorating the subway — has a $55 billion remit to ensure that the century-old transportation network’s existing decorative elements are restored and renewed. Yet several of the uptown Heins & LaFarge terra cotta signs at the original twenty-eight stations are chipped and defaced, while many mosaics of the subway’s second architect, Squire Vickers, across the boroughs need a good cleaning.

From practically the beginning, artists who paint and draw for Arts + Design — including the original work — have been given a list of approved materials and fabricators for their work, as well as directions for a set of processes that would ensure its durability, rehabilitation potential and longevity. All painters, in the tradition of Vickers, are encouraged to use mosaic fabricators for the execution of their final works in the subway, usually derived from drawings or paintings.

On March 20, 2022, the MTA announced its Re-NEW-vation Program with the goal of renovating the older, historic stations, from undertaking concrete repairs and water mitigation efforts to replacing tiles along the station walls, and deep cleaning everything. So far this year, the MTA has completed eleven of twelve scheduled facelifts and is on track to complete fifty by the end of the year, including Morgan Avenue, whose Squire Vickers’ tiles are obscured by graffiti, and Delancey/Essex, which needs scouring.

When considering submitting to the MTA Arts + Design program, artists come to realize that at least 500,000 people traveling through certain stations every day, especially Wall Street, with its proximity to the financial markets and the Battery. More people are likely to see the piece on than all of an artist’s shows put together. Because of that visibility, artists willingly take the risk of having their art defaced. In fact, many believe that changes to the subway art are not necessarily problematic, but emblematic of the relationship between art and the city.

Still, many want a serious conservation department — not just an initiative here and there. “Every major museum has a department of conservation, and right now, the MTA has essentially created a contemporary art museum underground,” said one artist who had her trompe l’oeil paintings made into 3D mosaics uptown. That said, the MTA suffered considerably during Covid and ran on a projected deficit of $1.6 billion in 2024. Its proposal to reduce budget gaps through 2028 by an average of $915 million annually leaves many wondering how the subway and commuter trains will keep running when federal aid runs out, let alone how the MTA can showcase new art.

When it comes to its pieces installed, the subway is possibly the most racially, ethnically, intellectually and gender-diverse collection of art among any of the institutions of New York. And most artists would never want the conservation to supersede the new work, as the new work keeps the subway exciting. “New York is constantly reinventing itself for better or worse and people are experiencing it in different ways,” the artist said. “Some people are going to come out of the Port Authority every day and forget about it, while others are going to think they saw something very special, whether mine is there in 1,000 years or something else.”

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Coming Soon: A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway has been optioned by a publisher in London. More information forthcoming.

The city owes its success to the waterfront, and so the Fulton Street subway station, which became the Fulton Street Transit Center after the demise of the World Trade Center, pays homage to New York’s maritime past with Beaux Arts murals and Arts and Crafts mosaics. Named after Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, the Fulton Street station includes bas reliefs of the many boats that circulated around New York Harbor.

From its very beginning, the subway was intended to be sophisticated — to celebrate and encourage the image of a thriving cosmopolitan center. In the initial planning of the MTA, the city insisted on hiring artists to elevate the subway experience by embellishing the underground walls with fanciful tile-work and mosaics. Originally designed by Heins & Lafarge, the Fulton Street subway station’s restoration brought back to life their ornate terra-cotta panels.

The station also includes the original Marine Grill Murals, created by artist Fred Dana Marsh in 1913. Marsh drew and painted New York during a period when its harbor was bustling with commerce, when it truly was a major port city. One subject that he returned to repeatedly over the course of his career was ships and boats on the water. “I was impressed by the sight of brawny workmen swinging out on girders and riveting the lacy skeletons of the earliest skyscrapers on lower Manhattan,” Marsh is known to have said.

Hidden away at the William Street entrance to the Fulton Street station are a collection of Marsh’s terracotta tile murals. They once enlivened the walls of a restaurant originally called the Rathskeller, but once the murals were finished, their beauty inspired the name change to the Marine Grill. It was a grand restaurant located in the world’s largest and one of the most luxurious hotels, the McAlpin, at 34th Street and Broadway.

The Rathskeller (from German-speaking countries for a bar or restaurant located in the basement of a city hall, Rathaus) was noted for its forest of archways and columns, completely clad in ceramic tile in an array of shades of terracotta, brown, gold, red and green. But once Marsh designed the six terracotta lunette-shaped murals, they covered the walls of the restaurant. Telling the story of New York City’s maritime history, the elaborate murals featured boats, canoes, tugs, ships, steamers, and ocean liners over a 300-year period. The space was an architectural masterpiece; the murals served as focal points around the restaurant. “It is my object then to depict the noble side of modern industry, to emulate the efforts of the real workers, the investors, the engineers, the electricians, the great army of toilers – to express in ‘lofty allegory’ the drama of modern life,” Marsh said.

Manufactured by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company of Staten Island, one of the companies that produced the terracotta tiles for subway stations in the early 20th century, the murals helped to make the Grill Room the fashionable meeting place for Herald Square shoppers lunching, a late-night rendezvous, or an elegant dinner. Other original signage were primarily intended to provide an indication of the station at which they were located. However, the elaborate tile-workings were not just decorative: the unique colors and patterns within all of the different station signs were also supposed to help non-English speakers identify their stops without having to decipher the foreign language.

Well past its glory days, the McAlpin Hotel was converted to cooperative apartments in 1989; the Marine Grill was demolished, and the glorious tile murals were packed into dumpsters, headed for landfill. The obscure, non-profit organization Friends of Terra Cotta, saw the disassembled murals in the dumpsters, and brought them to the attention of the New York Landmarks Preservation Committee. The tiles were rescued from outside the former hotel’s construction site. The MTA’s Arts and Design department restored the murals, and college art students, as part of an intern program, painstakingly reassembled the pieces as if they were giant jigsaw puzzles. The murals were installed in a corridor at floor-level height at the Fulton Street and Broadway subway station in 2000.

A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.

Dual Contracts stipulating the construction and operation of rapid transit lines in the City of New York were signed on 19 March 1913 and allowed the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) to merge and expand. The IRT then agreed to add on to the original subway line south down Seventh Avenue, Varick Street, and West Broadway to serve the West Side of Manhattan. Franklin Street was deemed a necessary place for a subway stop. Now on the 1 line, Franklin Street uses “store-window"-style displays for all of Squire Vickers’ signature mosaics and mosaic directional tablets.

When he wasn’t masterminding the look of the growing underground transit system, Vickers passed the hours painting and writing Romantic poetry. Though he did not live in the city, he was a regular subway rider; his daily commute from a Rockland County town called Grand View-on-Hudson to Manhattan included jaunts on the train, ferry and subway. Vickers’ stations encompass two types: the Arts and Crafts style, which are less ornate — and easier to maintain — than their Beaux Arts predecessors. Gone were the three-dimensional bas reliefs and swirling flourishes, as curves gave way to straight lines and faiences to vividly colored mosaic tiles and geometric designs.

Over time, though, his style shifted. When the city decided to erect the Independent Subway System — better known as the IND — in 1932, Vickers adapted Machine Age design, a variant of Art Deco, Machine Age styles were more streamlined and bolder, evoking a feeling of modernity and precision. The station name tiles shifted to sans-serif fonts and solid colors and the stations used austere mosaic name tiles with sharp edges and bold colors — vibrant and lively, but straight-to-the-point and all business.

Vickers would have loved the mass reaction to Aretha Franklin’s death in August 2018. Makeshift tributes — a mix of wheat-pasted messages, spray chalk and graffiti — to the Queen of Soul automatically popped up at Franklin Street and Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn. But, just as it did to stem the tide of graffiti, the MTA stepped in to control the aesthetic. “We wanted to memorialize the outpouring of love from the community for Aretha Franklin and in consultation with local leaders we agreed that ‘respect’ was a beautiful tribute and worthy message,” then-MTA spokesperson Jon Weinstein told local news website Gothamist. The black-and-white signs, which have the official MTA logo on them, were put up on September 1st to coincide with Franklin's funeral.

Brooklyn activist Leroy McCarthy put up the first Franklin tribute at Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn and brought the idea of a Franklin Street tribute to the MTA: “I saw the attention it was getting, so I reached out to MTA and asked if they would be open to a collaboration, suggesting a mural that said ‘Respect’ on the exterior wall,” McCarthy told a local paper, the Brooklyn Reader. “They came back instead with the idea of putting up ‘Respect’ throughout the station.” The MTA, of course, made sure that the Franklin signs matched all of its current branding.

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A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.

As the Twin Towers came crashing down on 11 September 2001, they fell directly atop the Cortlandt Street subway stop on the No. 1 line, burying it under debris, its sturdy beams “bent like paper clips,” according to the New York Times. The sat unused — missing from the New York City subway map even — as the new sprawling World Trade Center complex grew and grew and grew aboveground. Mixing the old with the new — as well as relocating it under Greenwich Street — the Cortlandt Street/World Trade Center station features, in addition to the Vickers’ signage, Anne Hamilton’s Chorus (2018), a 4,350-square-foot mural that weaves embossed words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and UN Declaration of Human Rights on the station walls. 

The Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) built and opened in 1918 the Van Cortlandt station as part of the “dual contracts” between the IRT and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) for the construction and/or rehabilitation and operation of rapid transit lines in all the boroughs of the City of New York. The station underwent its first renovation in the 1960s when Minoru Yamasaki was chosen to design the Twin Towers and Emery Roth & Sons undertook the Marriott (3WTC) and buildings 4-7 WTC. Built between 1966 and 1975, at a cost of $400 million (equivalent to $3.80 billion in 2023), the initiative by Governor Nelson Rockefeller came from an idea of his brother, David Rockefeller, to stimulate urban renewal in Lower Manhattan.

Yamasaki’s original plan called for 80-story towers, but expanded to 110 stories each to meet the Port Authority's requirement for 10,000,000 square. The portion of Cortlandt Street above the station was demolished to make way for the World Trade Center.

The station, called “WTC Cortlandt” to reflect its connection to the site, cost $181.8 million. As a gateway to destinations of worldwide significance (the World Trade Center and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum) Hamilton’s Chorus weaves together past and present, underground and surface, deep-rooted memory and momentary impatience with words. Hamilton, a professor of art at Ohio State University in Columbus, set Chorus in monochromatic marble, forming a white-on-white tactile surface that frames the subway platforms and the movement of subway riders, who are invited to touch the text as they read the words. They are supposed to come away with creating meaningful personal encounters meant to acknowledge the civic ideals and aspirations that form the foundation for the quality of life above, according to the artist.

Not one of the original 28, although close, Rector Street also his station has the Squire Vickers tile placement, but decades of debris unfortunately cover the tracks, the floors, and the formerly vivid tile reproduction of King’s College, otherwise known as Columbia University, when it lived downtown in the late 19th century. 

Lastly, Oculus (1998), a constellation of stone and glass mosaics in the underground labyrinth of the interconnected subway stations of lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center/Park Place/Chamber Street Stations, uses three hundred mosaic eyes, drawn from a photographic study of more than twelve hundred young New Yorkers. Created by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, the work’s centerpiece is a large detailed, elliptical glass and stone mosaic floor in which the continents of the earth — interwoven with the City of New York — surround a large eye. “The mosaic is at once a vision of the world, a reflecting pool of water and a representation New York City in its proper geographical orientation, reads the artist’s statement.

“The work’s detailed renderings of the eye — the most telling, fragile and vulnerable human feature — offer a profound sense of intimacy within a public place,” it continues. “Together, the images create a sense of unity and flow: animating, orienting and humanizing the station.”

Located in passageways under the World Trade Center, Oculus went largely untouched by the events of 11 September 2001. “Oculus was created to personalize and integrate the stations,” the artists stated. “Eyes are both subtle and strong — they engage passing individuals, allowing for meditation or inviting dialogue.” An enormous central eye set in the floor, grounds the composition and serves as the center piece of a map of the world which radiates outward.

A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.

The 28th station of the Original 28, 145th Street was the northern terminus on opening day of the subway, October 27, 1904. The Heins & LaFarge cornucopia is very visible, but so is the Squire Vickers mosaic. Architects George L. Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge, friends and MIT graduates who ran their own architecture shop they named Heins & LaFarge had previously done little of note until 1891 until they designed the interior of St. John the Divine at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street. Heins & LaFarge met banker John Belmont, who had donated a chapel to St. John the Divine, and in March 1901, he gave them the contract for the new subway system’s interior. The 145th Street stop was their last subway job.

The (Original) South Ferry Station

Wherever possible, Heins & LaFarge made a conscious effort to create a distinct wall treatment for each station, both to relieve monotony and assist in location finding for a mostly illiterate and foreign population. They often used a local landmark in the decorative scheme, such as the sail boats at the South Ferry station produced by the Hartford Faience Company, an offshoot of Massachusetts-based Grueby Faience, which outfitted many of the other stations. 

The new South Ferry station was home to the impressive sailboat faience, but the station was nearly destroyed in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. It now resides at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn.

See It Split, See It Change, installed in 2009 by Doug and Mike Starn, however, survived Hurrican Sandy. It uses three different artworks to distinguish the South Ferry’s significance: a decayed over-scaled leaf that links the park to its history; a mosaic map of contemporary Manhattan overlaid on a map of old New York to show the city's evolution; and a segment of the Battery Wall, excavated in December 2005 by the Museum of the City of New York’s archaeological team. It is the first public artwork by identical twins in the subway. “We saw the subway system as a conveyance, where connections are made,” the Starns told the New York Times when it opened. At a cost of more than $1 million to install, it is the most expensive artwork to date.

The 2, 3 line came out of a confluence of factors. As the railroads boomed across the nation, mid-19th-century New York City had a number of above-ground railways used mostly for freight transport, as well as for taking city workers to the suburbs sprouting up on Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1896, several financiers formed the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) to extend express train service into Upper Manhattan and Brooklyn, simplify the Alphabet soup of trains coming in-and-out of the city. and build more stations. The city granted the contracts to two privately owned systems, the original subway firm, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT). Work soon began on the Red Line. 

By that time, George Lewis Heins had died, and Christopher Grant Lafarge had given up the subway project to focus on Long Island commissions for such tycoons as J. Pierpont Morgan. The IRT hired Squire J. Vickers, a painter-turned-architect and “underground Renaissance man,” to continue the work of designing a user-friendly subway. An eccentric who kept his artistic life alive while working steadily on the subway, Vickers pushed the subway administrators toward a more pared-down, modern path than his Beaux-Arts predecessors. He synthesised elements of the Arts and Crafts movement — a British reaction to mechanization — and the austerity of the Machine Age to create a “just-the-facts” style, using sans-serif type and mosaic. “How grateful to the eye is the wall surface unbroken by panelling, noxious ornament or the misplaced string course, decorated, if you like, inlaid with color, but unbroken,” Vickers once wrote. Instead of disguising the steel and concrete structure of the subway, Vickers celebrated the subway’s underlying industrial character. The Red Line stretches all the way from upper Manhattan to central Brooklyn and features a wide variety of media to tell the stories of all the neighborhoods through which it runs.

At the bottom of the South Ferry Station, See It Split, See It Change (2009) runs straight into Passages (2000) by Frank Giorgini at Whitehall Street on the yellow line. Artist, educator, and designer Giorgini (1947-2022) designed elements in ceramic, stone and metal also to blend with the historic fabric of the station, such as the original bands of mosaic tile work. The cityscape begins at the entrance of the station and then travels backward through time to the era before European settlement, with Native American canoes and a marshland of flora and fauna. In this section, sculptures of fish are are offset by a mosaic of sea and sky.

A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.

In designing the 1907 campus for the City College at Amsterdam Avenue and 138th Street, the architect George B. Post wanted a design to counter McKim, Mead & White’s lofty, imperial Roman-style Columbia College and a Renaissance-style campus for New York University’s Bronx branch to the North (now Bronx Community College). Post chose a rugged Gothic style in Manhattan schist, set off with brilliant white terra cotta for the campus. To complement to simplicity of the architecture of the campus buildings, Squire Vickers also went with a pared back subway design. And while the three faces of Janus seem three-dimensional, that is an optical illusion well-honed by Vickers and the painters with whom he worked.

On the ground level of 137th Street/City College, is Steve Wood's artwork Fossils (1988) which  consists of 160 eight-by-eight-inch bronze relief tiles (80 each on the uptown and downtown platforms) embedded in the platform walls of the station. The tiles portray the fossilised remains of a variety of biological life. “The idea behind Fossils is simple: the subway is underground, fossils are found in the earth,” Wood says. “I wanted these reliefs to be ‘scattered’ over the walls of the northbound and southbound platforms… They are meant to be looked at, touched, talked about, and remembered.” 

To get there: Take the uptown 2, 3 from any train downtown to 96th Street. Switch to the 1 train from exit at 137th Street, exit the train. The Fossils are immediately outside the train, while the Vickers mosaic is on the Southbound side near the station exit.

A Guide to the art of all 472 stations of the New York City subway:

From 2018 through 2021, I stopped off at 400+ stations of the New York City subway, took photographs of the public art there and researched the origin of the art, first for Instagram, then for Substack, for a 2023 Spectator article and now, hopefully, for a guidebook. A proof-of-concept book proposal 472 Stations: The People’s Guide to the Art of the New York City Subway is available.