NYC Subway Art: The 4 Line

Over the past few years New York’s MTA has commissioned dozens of works by NYC artists for its subway stations. Most of them are on subway walls in ceramic tile, but there are plenty of surprises. People just walk past them, but they are really worth a look, so a friend and I took an afternoon to tour the 12 stations on the 4 line that feature commissioned art.

In writing up the tour, I’m going to try to give you more specific directions than we had, so you can do more looking and less walking. If you want to follow our trail, you might want to get an “unlimited ride” Metrocard for at least the day, so you can leave the subway system from time to time and have a snack or a cup of coffee or a bathroom break. We started at the Brooklyn end of the line and worked our way up to 161st Street in Manhattan.

Utica Avenue: Hugo Consuegra, “Good Morning, Good Night”

We started at the Brooklyn terminus of the 4 line, Utica Avenue. The art is easy to find: when you arrive you are in the platform of the Brooklyn-bound tunnel, whose walls are adorned on both sides with the “Good Night” tiles that are half of the work. Directly above is the Manhattan-bound platform with the “Good Morning” tiles.

Presumably people in this neighborhood travel into Manhattan in the morning and return at night, so the platform walls on the Manhattan-bound track have “morning” scenes (10 in all, repeated on each long wall) all featuring a cheery sun looking down on various bits of scenery: a barnyard, a beach, etc. Correspondingly, the Brooklyn-bound platform has scenes featuring a cheerful crescent moon.

Like many of the works we looked at on this tour, this one subsumes the rhythm of subway by repeating a motif with variations at regular intervals. Both the repetition and the variation are essential to the effect: same sun, different scenes; on the other wall, same series, different order of scenes; in the other tunnel, same idea but with a moon. The scenes are themselves static and universal (the beach could be any beach); but a sense of movement and vibrancy comes from their serial positioning (you have to walk or ride along to view them) and from variations in the way the sun (or moon) relates to each scene. For example, in the beach scene the sun is sweating profusely, a quick touch of humor that also has a role to play in the rhythm because it is so accessible and encourages the viewer not to linger but to step to the next scene for the next bit of levity.

Out of four stars, we give this work 2.75.

Hugo Consuegra died on Jan. 24, 2003. Here is a news feed from that day that includes an obituary.

Franklin Avenue / Botanic Gardens: Millie Burns, "IL7/Square"

This was the second-biggest disappointment on the whole line. It's a wrought-iron fence that surrounds the park above the station. The verticals form a wavy, as-if-windblown pattern and are festooned with wrought-iron maple leaves, but that's all the arty you get and Robert Moses fenced all his parks this way, with different locale-specific designs for each one, over 50 years ago right here in New York City. Besides, the black paint is already coming off the iron in streaks, dots, and chunks.

Our rating: one star.

Atlantic Avenue / Pacific Street: George Trakas, "Hook, Line, and Sinker"

To find this work go to the grand high-ceilinged stairway at the point where the people coming into the station from the 4 and 5 meet the ones coming in from the 2 and 3. Stand on the stairway and look up, way up. The uppermost reach of the ceiling is actually the shell of the small original station from 1908, located at street level in the triangle formed by Atlantic, 4th, and Flatbush Avenues. The shell has a double-pitched roof of glass that illuminates the stairway below. Set into it is a construction of metal rods that is kind of a stylized sailing ship. I'm guessing the reference is to the names of the station and the maritime phase in Brooklyn's history. All in all, it's a fun sight to see.

The old station itself is also a fine gem when seen from outside at street level, though it looks dwarfed and lonely in its little triangle amid the traffic.

Across 4th Avenue is an interesting-looking Victorian-Gothic church with a sign out front that says it is the "Church of the Redeemer" and "Episcopal-Anglican."

Our rating for the sculpture: 2.5 stars.

Nevins Street: Antonio van Dalen, “Work and Nature”

This work is a pair of images in ceramic tile. You will find it on either side of the token booth. It’s ok.

Our rating: 1.5 stars


Fulton Street / Broadway Nassau: Nancy Holt, “Astral Gallery”

This work is in the corridor leading from the entrance to the uptown 4 line toward the exit marked “Fulton Street / Broadway NW Corner.” It is just a group of circular light fixtures, with 2 to 6 bare bulbs per fixture, in an array of straight bars above a corridor, supposedly arranged as they would be in certain constellations in the sky. It took us forever to find this work, partly because it did not look that different from all the other lights in the station, and all the other peeling cast iron. Some of the bulbs were blown, which is understandable in a station as vast as this one but not in an artwork that purports to represent an arrangement of stars. Stars don’t burn out in the lifetime of a 60-watt bulb, and when they do they are not replaced by someone from Housekeeping.

Our rating: 1 star

Fulton Street / Broadway Nassau: Fred Dana Marsh, “Marine Grill Murals” (1912)
These are six large ceramic images of ships, each about five or six feet square. The MTA acquired them in 1989 from the McAlpin Hotel, whose “Marine Grill” took its name from their subject matter. In one we see Indians bringing gifts to the first European ship, in another a British gunboat blasting away at the Battery, and so on. The technique could be a little more accomplished, but the enthusiasm and the harmonious compositions make them very enjoyable. Location: one of the many corridors of this huge station, but alas I did not make a note of which one. But you won’t overlook them; they command attention.

Our rating: 3.25 stars

Brooklyn Bridge / City Hall: Mark Gibian, “Cable Crossing”

This exciting installation is in the token-booth area at the exit to City Hall Park and Centre Street. It uses cable like that which holds up the nearby Brooklyn Bridge. It comprises two sculptures: a vertical arrangement next to the booth and a horizontal one overhead. Both arrange the cables in a rhythm that expresses the rush of traffic across the bridge but with the solidity of the cables and their connectors counterpoised against that dynamism.

Our rating: 2 stars


14th Street / Union Square: Mary Miss, “Framing Union Square”

This is a series of paired columns, one a slender red U bar with mirrored backing on the inside of the U and the other a vertically cut section from the original tiling of this station, surmounted by an ornate escutcheon with a bold “14.” The backs of the original sections are solid stone, cut with a huge circular saw that left marks one can feel with one’s hands. Like the Gibian at the Brooklyn Bridge station, its appeal is largely in its rhythm: the pairs follow each other in a straight and ceremonious line along a long corridor, the severity relieved by the fact that the last two are broken off at the tops of the wall sections, so that one sees only a bit of the escutcheons.

Miss has also installed a long rectangle, framed in the same red, along a nearby corridor.

There are a few other columns nearby in the same red, these being round rather than U-shaped and apparently structural in function. Did the artist paint these to appropriate them for her installation? Cannot say.

Our rating: 3.5 stars

Grand Central Station: Dan Sinclair, “Speedball” and “Fast Track”

These are chrome-and-bronze (I’m guessing) installations that express the feel of this grandest of all stations by suggesting both speed (in their rhythmic arrangement – a recurring point in these works) and 1930s technological confidence and gleam. They are in a long, wide corridor that connects the “S” shuttle platforms to the area where one takes the 4, 5, 6, and 7 trains. “Speedball,” the larger of the two, ranges across the wall above the gateway from the corridor as one leaves the shuttle.

Our rating: 3 stars

Grand Central Station: Jackie Ferrara, “Arches, Towers, Pyramids”

This comprises long bands of stylized images of monuments, one on each side of the tunnel where the “S” shuttle arrives and departs and another in the corridor that leads from the 7 platform toward the “S.” Like the Consuegra at the Utica Avenue station, they gain a trainride-like rhythm by repeating similar designs and/or duplicates at regular intervals, but they are not as effective. It is pretty corny to respond to the name “Grand Central Station” by stylizing “grand” and “central” edifices dimly remembered from History class. And were the edifices in fact “central” in the world-views of their own societies? This is an open question that frays the edges of one’s experience of this work.

Here's a little more information about Jackie Ferrara.

Our rating: 2.5 stars

Grand Central Station: Christopher Sproat, “V-Beam”

This is a sequence of light fixtures above the platform of the 7 line. They illuminate the entire platform. Each is a triangle of fluorescent bulbs, with the base up and the apex down and terminating in a grand sculpture of polished metal drums and circles that, like Sinclair’s installation, give that 1930s-technology-makes-us-confident feel. And there’s the trainride rhythm again – each fixture is the same, so the way they march off toward the blessedly unobstructed end of the platform is stately and musical.

Our rating: 3 stars


59th Street: Elizabeth Murray, “Blooming”

Along this stretch of the 4 line the downtown track runs directly below the uptown track. An escalator leads from the north end of the lower platform to a mezzanine and then another escalator takes one the rest of the way to the upper platform. Murray’s mosaics are in that mezzanine, and they are swell. She uses shoes and coffee cups of green and red-to-tan, some huge, some small, all of them playful and exuberant. She uses just about all of the four large walls of the space, so the impact is strong. This is one of my favorites on this tour!

For more information on Murray, see this article in "ArtCyclopedia"

Our rating: 4 stars

86th Street: Peter Sís, “Happy City”

This is a pair of mosaics on the walls to the right and left of the exit turnstiles on the northbound platform. The Upper East Side is a pretty happy place to be, and this is a happy evocation of it. Each is a big eye composed of architectural and other features of the neighborhood. The eye on the right is blue and has a gray Guggenheim Museum positioned off to one side and (for some reason) a gray turtle off to the other. Its excitement seems just right for 86th Street.

Peter Sís has a website that is worth a look.

Our rating: 2.75 stars

125th Street: Houston Conwill, “The Open Secret”

This work comprises six triangles of cast iron set into the tiling of the area just inside the turnstiles at this station’s “125th and Lexington Avenue” exit. Three of the triangles are done in some kind of maybe lost wax technique so the iron has the look and feel of textured cloth pieces and other objects; the other three are subdivided into little compartments such as printers used for the pieces of type they would set by hand. In the compartments are nonrepresentational bits and pieces. The plaque on the wall beside this work says Conwill did it in memory of a poet named Larry Neal and quotes a poem the latter wrote. In different but complementary ways, the poem and the installation speak to the experience of African-American slavery and its aftermath.

Our rating: 3.25 stars

125th Street: Valerie Maynard, “Polyrhythmics of Consciousness and Light”

This is just past the Conwill installation. Glass mosaic. Colorful and rhythmic, but not very interesting.

Our rating: 2 stars


161st Street: Helene Brandt, “Room of Tranquility”

This work faces the turnstiles at the “4” line exit. It is a long, horizontal mosaic in glass, stone, and marble. It does playful things with trompe-l’oeil, bringing together the spaces its room connects but at the same time “lengthening” the distance between them through visual trumpery and making the traversal of that space more interesting.

Here is a personal statement by Helene Brandt.

Our rating: 3 stars

161st Street: Vito Acconci, “Wall-Slide”

This work in tiles, stone, and fiberglass is on a wall perpendicular to the police station in the area where one gets the B or D train. Imagine that the midsection of a “161st Street” sign just decided to jump up 6 feet in the air. That’s what this looks like, with rich black stone (or fiberglass made to look like stone?) in the back space against which this feat of resurrection has taken place. The flat, well organized design of the “subway tunnel wall” that would be the setting for the sign tilts down from right to left, so staidness is losing out, but not without retaining its geometric serenity.

ArtCyclopedia has an article on Acconci.

Our rating: 2.5 stars.

There you are, 12 stations, 17 artists, and you’ve done the 4 line! I also have a Photosite blog of the tour -- the pictures bigger, better, and more plentiful, but not there is not much text. While looking around on the internet I found an official MTA web tour of all their artworks, so you might want to take a look there too.

My thanks to UBS: the exhibition in their Manhattan lobby is what got us interested in subway art, and their how-to-find-it leaflet made our tour possible.