Three Artists Commissioned for New York Transit Stations
New York's transit agency has commissioned three artists to make new works for its stations, and the pieces will reach commuters in very different ways. Ivan Forde, Trevor Paglen and Howardena Pindell will each create an artwork for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the public agency that runs the city's subways, buses and commuter railways, ArtNews reported.
The commissions come through MTA Arts & Design, the agency's art programme, which is led by its director, Tina Vaz.
Forde will make a large-scale mosaic installation for Broadway Junction, a subway station in Brooklyn. The work is titled Bedtime Story for Brownsville: The Fish Who Carried the Moon (2026). Parts of it will sit in the entrance to the L train, a subway line, and on a pedestrian bridge above Van Sinderen Avenue. A mosaic is a picture made from small pieces of glass or stone, set into a surface one tile at a time.
Paglen's commission is called Perennial (2026). It will be installed in a pedestrian overpass and a new parking garage at the Southeast stop on the Metro-North line, the commuter railway that carries riders in from the suburbs. For the work, Paglen will photograph flowers growing near the station. An algorithm, a set of step-by-step instructions run by a computer, will then study the colours of those flowers and turn them into an abstract spectrum, a band of colour shifting from one hue to the next.
Pindell's piece is for the Botanical Garden station on Metro-North. It is a glass installation built from photographs she took at the New York Botanical Garden, the large plant garden in the Bronx. She edited the images and transferred them onto glass.
Taken together, the three works sit in three different parts of the transit network, from a Brooklyn subway hub to suburban commuter stops. Each one ties its station to a specific place, whether a neighbourhood, a local plant population or a botanical garden. For the people who pass through these stations every day, the art will become part of the walk to the platform, the wait for a train, or the drive into the parking garage.
