“Funktional Vibrations” by Xenobia Bailey at NYCT 34 St–Hudson Yards Station. Photograph: Sid Tabak
MTA Arts & Design, one of many world’s largest public-art collections, is marking 40 years of delivering public artwork throughout the MTA system with a yearlong celebration to characteristic commemorative initiatives and new work. Began in 1985 and encompassing a broad spectrum of inventive exercise—together with poetry, stay musical performances, posters, pictures, digital artwork, occasions, and greater than 400 site-specific modern artworks—MTA Arts & Design is a visual expression of the MTA’s dedication to selling security, respect, and an enhanced atmosphere for riders.
“For forty years, MTA Arts & Design has championed artwork in every single place for everybody, creating moments of pleasure for the thousands and thousands of riders who depend on MTA providers every day,” mentioned Tina Vaz, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “As a part of this anniversary 12 months, we’re thrilled to current a spread of particular programming in station environments, subway automobiles, and past, whereas we proceed to ship transformative experiences of artwork throughout the system.”
The Fortieth-anniversary celebration kicked off on 10/7 with the launch of a brand new everlasting art work and three new digital-art commissions:
New Everlasting Paintings
A steel sculpture by Jorge Luis Rodriguez debuts as a part of the Park Avenue Viaduct Substitute challenge, which rehabilitates historic practice infrastructure and can permit Metro-North Railroad to proceed offering protected and dependable practice service for generations to return. Entitled Harlem Melodic Moments, Rodriguez’s dynamic celebration of East Harlem’s wealthy musical legacy—salsa, bolero, Latin jazz, jazz blues, gospel, be-bop, hip-hop, rap, and different danceable fusion genres—spans the east and west sides of Park Avenue at East 116 Road. Fabricated in aluminum, the monumental work measures 6 toes excessive and 96 toes lengthy on both sides, totaling greater than 1,150 sq. toes.
New Digital Artworks
A Information Love Letter to the Subway by Giorgia Lupi will launch on 50 screens at Fulton Heart and run two minutes on the prime of each hour by means of December 2025. Utilizing information culled from sources together with the MTA Open Information program and on-line “missed connection” message boards, the work visualizes every MTA subway line as a personality with distinctive qualities extracted from its associated information. Imaginatively animating every line’s age, size, and path, Lupi explores their interwoven encounters with commuters and each other. By turning the prosaic acquainted right into a poetic narrative, Lupi’s Love Letterreveals the connections that hum within the background of our shared city life. The work is realized with technical help from Westfield RISE and ANC Sports activities.
Yesterday, October 7, two new digital artworks launched on the large-scale, 5-channel screens of the Grand Central Madison concourse. Keep in mind, Gullah Island, an alternate-reality work by Jazsalyn that includes evocative digital renderings, takes a visible journey to Gullah Geechee Hall, Atlantic coastal plains stretching from North Carolina to Florida that maintain particular cultural significance to African American communities. Embedded with notions of residence and belonging, Keep in mind, Gullah Island invitations commuters to pause of their every day journey and join with tales of departure, arrival, resilience, and cultural perseverance. The piece will run each six minutes by means of March 2026.
Video set up Breathe with Me by Kate Bae , in collaboration with Hyo Jung Bea, immerses viewers in a poetic underwater world. Impressed by diving with haenyeo, girls divers from South Korea’s Jeju Island, the work explores human and local weather vulnerability as divers launch their breath, stroll alongside the ocean ground, and attain towards each other. By means of fascinating underwater footage, Bae and Bea supply an alternate type of motion to the push of city life—one that enables for intentional connection and a second for a deep respiratory. Breathe with Me is supported partly by Basis for Up to date Arts Emergency Grant. The work will run each six minutes by means of March 2026.
Further Programing
By means of September 2026, MTA Arts & Design will mark its Fortieth anniversary with a variety of ongoing and particular programming together with new station artwork, poetry and posters in subway automobiles and on platforms, and pictures exhibitions plus stay poetry readings, particular musical performances, and extra.
On Wednesday, October 8 from 9am-6pm, MTA Music presents particular performances by Anthony Carrera (handpan/guitar), Angel Cruz (vocals), and Inti and the Moon (Rumba/flamenco folks), in recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month.
As a part of Open Home New York Weekend, October 17-19, Arts & Design will lead 4 particular “Artwork All over the place for Everybody” excursions, with stops alongside the Pelham Line within the Bronx, the Jamaica Line, the , and Grand Central Madison. Tourgoers could have the chance to go to artworks at transit stations, meet the artists, and find out about Arts & Design’s commissioning course of and the tales behind every site-specific art work created for the varied communities and riders of the MTA system.
Further programming will likely be introduced within the coming weeks.
A particular Fortieth-anniversary logomark, designed with in-kind help from Pentagram, will likely be featured in all Arts & Design supplies by means of September 2026.
ABOUT MTA ARTS & DESIGN
MTA Arts & Design encourages using public transportation by offering visible and performing arts within the metropolitan New York space. The % for Artwork program is without doubt one of the largest and most various collections of site-specific public artwork on the planet, with greater than 400 commissions by world-famous, mid-career and rising artists. Arts & Design produces Graphic Arts, Digital Artwork, photographic Lightbox exhibitions, in addition to stay musical performances in stations by means of its MUSIC (Music Beneath New York) program, and the Poetry in Movement program in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. It serves the thousands and thousands of people that rely on MTA subways and commuter trains and strives to create significant connections between websites, neighborhoods, and folks.
ABOUT JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ
Jorge Luis Rodriguez arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1963. Following a profession in promoting, Rodriguez was educated on the College of Visible Arts and New York College the place he earned a grasp’s diploma in Sculpture. He was an artist-in-residence on the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1980 and created Development, the primary New York Metropolis % for Artwork everlasting art work fee in 1985. Rodriguez taught sculpture on the Kingsborough Neighborhood School and College of Visible Arts. His work has been displayed on the historic gallery Simply Above Midtown, El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Up to date Hispanic Arts.
ABOUT GIORGIA LUPI
Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning designer and a accomplice at Pentagram’s New York studio. Skilled as an architect at Università degli Studi di Ferrara, she earned her PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano; in 2022 she obtained an honorary doctorate in Effective Arts from MICA, the Maryland Institute School of Artwork. Lupi was the 2022 recipient of the Nationwide Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the 2025 recipient of the Compasso d’Oro for her visible op-ed My Life with Lengthy Covid. Her work is within the everlasting assortment of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. In her observe, Lupi and her staff create vibrant visible data-driven narratives throughout print, environmental, and digital media that forge new perception and appreciation of individuals, concepts, and organizations.
ABOUT JAZSALYN
Jazsalyn is an artist and researcher working the place fiction and actuality collide. By means of various media and re-indigenization, her observe considers points relating to information loss, reminiscence restoration, and Ancestral Intelligence. She develops long-term initiatives with recreation engines, algorithmic processes, and video artwork to discover counter-futures and complicated human-to-nonhuman data programs. As a lecturer at The New College, she has constructed curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative know-how. She is the Creative Director of the experimental curatorial challenge Black Past, the place she curates exhibitions and experiences to check alternate realities for (b)lackness. Her work has been supported by Serpentine Arts Applied sciences, New Museum, Pioneer Works, Artistic Time, and extra. She has been featured in publications equivalent to Cultured Journal, It’s Good That, Vogue, and The New Yorker.
ABOUT KATE BAE
Kate Bae is a multidisciplinary immigrant artist working between New York Metropolis and South Korea. Her observe spans portray, site-specific installations, and sculptural works, with a robust deal with materials exploration and transformation. She experiments with layering, casting, and peeling paint on unconventional surfaces, creating works that embody fragmentation, reminiscence, and id. Just lately, impressed by diving with Jeju’s haenyeo (Sea Girls), Bae has expanded her work into video and set up, exploring the delicate, rhythmic qualities of water. These new mediums permit her to research the porous boundaries between physique, atmosphere, and reminiscence. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island College of Design and a BFA from the College of the Artwork Institute of Chicago. She is the founding father of Girls’s Cactus for the Arts and has exhibited on the Jeju Museum of Artwork, Brooklyn Museum, and Wausau Museum. Her work has been supported by the Puffin Basis, the Actual Artwork Award, and the Ora Lerman Belief. She has participated in residencies on the Golden Basis, MASS MoCA Studios, and the Wassaic Mission.
ABOUT HYO JUNG BEA
Hyo Jung Bea is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans efficiency, video, sculpture, and set up. Her observe facilities on the physique’s connection to trauma, labor, displacement, and therapeutic. Drawing from her personal experiences of migration, sickness, and cultural dislocation, Bea reinterprets the physique as an area of each fragility and energy. By means of poetic and visceral imagery, she confronts emotional and bodily discomfort, typically embodying symbolic varieties—equivalent to a hedgehog coated in thumbtacks—to discover themes of worry, intimacy, and safety. Bea’s current work is profoundly influenced by the haenyeo , the ocean girls of Jeju Island, whose energy, silence, and interdependence with the ocean function metaphor and inspiration. She studied Visible Arts at Seoul Nationwide College of Expertise, holds a BFA from CUNY Hunter School, and earned her MFA in Sculpture from Jeju Nationwide College. She has exhibited on the Jeju Museum of Up to date Artwork, Jeju Museum of Artwork, and the Insa Artwork Heart (Seoul).
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