Subway Art on New York's "R" Line
On June 26, 2006, Claire and I toured the art installations on the R subway line in New York, from Union Street in Brooklyn all the way through Manhattan to Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. Here are some photos, observations on the works, and notes on how to find them. The images below are small, but if you click on them you will see them in an adequately large format.
Union Street, Brooklyn: Emmett Wigglesworth, CommUnion, 1994
Where to see it: along both platforms
We weren't that impressed with this installation. Presumably Wigglesworth was drawing from the idea of "union" from the station's name and commenting on it by combining various "strands" into the one "cable." That seems too literal to me, and the umpteen iterations marching along both sides of the platform, though all different from each other, give the sense of same-old pretty fast.
DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn: Stephen Johnson, DeKalb Improvisation, 2005
Where to see it: inside the station, just after you go through the turnstiles
This is just the thing for a station because no matter how many times you walk past it there will be something else to notice. It's big and splashy and has lots of references to Brooklyn, to the trains that stop here, to sports -- things it's good to think about as you dash to work.
23rd Street, Manhattan: Keith Godard, Memories of Twenty-Third Street, 2002
Where to see it: along both platforms
Godard uses hats and small, indistinct labels to get folks who are waiting for the train in touch with the history just above them, in Madison Square. You look at a hat, then down at the label to see whose hat it is. Thus, the fancy hats of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit memorialize the architect of the original Madison Square Garden and his former mistress, whose husband shot White dead at a glittering Garden party in 1906. Great fun!
28th Street, Manhattan: Mark Hadjipateras, City Dwellers (for Costas and Maro), 2002
Where to see it: along both platforms
34th Street / Herald Square: Nicholas Pearson, Halo, 1991
This is a clever idea. White globes are placed far above the heads of subwaygoers, democratically giving each of them a halo, sort of. But after all these years they are not very white any more. They are caked with grime, and dust bunnies fill the folds in the surfaces.
Where to see it: inside the turnstiles of the 32nd/33rd Street entrance
34th Street / Herald Square: David Provan, Yab-Yum, 1992
Provan's mobiles pose directly above the tracks, so when a train arrives or departs the resulting wind makes them whirl slowly. The graceful movements of the mobiles contrast with their physical "gravitas" -- thick plates and rods of heavy steel.
Where to see it: directly above the northbound F and V track (view them from the escalator)
Times Square: Jack Beal, The Return of Spring / The Onset of Winter, 2001/2005
Where to see it: between the two exits for 41st Street and 7th Avenue (NW corner and SE corner)
This is a take on the Proserpina myth. On one wall we see Onset of Winter: Our heroine descends into the depths -- of a subway! The myth-makers of our modern age are a film crew, which has drawn the inevitable audience. Each person in the audience is literally illuminated and metaphorically transformed by the glow from the film crew's lights, a comment on our own individual relationship to today's myths and their heroines and heroes. This is perhaps best seen in the two boys watching in the foreground:
Even their dog seems ennobled by what is before him. On the facing wall we see the other side of the Proserpina myth, the return of Spring:
The darkness of the other image is supplanted by a sunlit scene in which Beal's Proserpina is posed to remind one of a figure from Botticelli's Primavera. There still is an underworld, but the workmen at the left need heavy equipment if they want to get to it.
Beal's treatment is not a satire. It does not diminish us moderns by setting us beside the grandeurs of the past, the way T. S. Eliot would. Rather, it makes New Yorkers seem at least as noble as the greats of yesteryear.
Times Square: Toby Buonagurio, Times Square Times: 35 Times, 2005
Where to see it: at the 41st and Broadway entrance, or go from the uptown R train toward the 1 and 2 trains
Buonagurio's square ceramics celebrate the joys of Times Square. Here are a few of the 35:
Happy New Year
Seafood cookery
Subway living
The Theater District
Hot Dogs sold from carts
Tourists
... and feet, thousands and thousands of feet in shoes from every part of the world.
Times Square: Jacob Lawrence, New York in Transit, 2001
We were not impressed, and I am not posting an image of this one.
Where to see it: between the uptown and downtown R train elevators, near the exit for the SE corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street
Times Square: Roy Lichtenstein, Times Square Mural, 2000
Where to see it: from the bottom of the escalators at the entrance from the SE corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street
Fifth Avenue / 59th Street, Manhattan: Ann Schaumberger
Where to see it: along both platforms and at the entrance from 59th and Central Park West
One of the exits from this station leads you to the Central Park Zoo, which is Schaumberger's theme. We can attest that the mosaics are a delight to grandchildren; others might find them a little too cute.
36th Street, Queens: Owen Smith, An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders, 1998
We could not find it in the station. There were numerous blackened cut-out areas in the tiled walls. Perhaps the installation has been removed, leaving these areas?
Jackson Heights / Roosevelt Avenue, Queens: Tom Patti, Passage, 2004
Where to see it: The whole station is a work of art, a thrill to behold both inside and out, with grand, sweeping spaces and intriguing colors. We are guessing that the specific work, "Passage" is only the colored inserts in the windows:
These are just one part of the wonderful effect of the whole atrium:
Woodhaven Boulevard, Queens: Pablo Tauler, In Memory of the Lost Battalion, 1996
posted by Dick Stracke @ 9:52 AM
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