The New York subway, home to hundreds of permanent artworks, is the city’s largest art space — but with none of the pretence. The system’s routes span nearly 250 miles, with 472 stations; it operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is ridden more than one billion times a year. Some of the world’s most renowned artists have contributed to this mostly underground museum, its works primarily made of tiles, metal and stained glass. People walk through the front doors of a museum “with a certain intentionality, but in the subway you’re in the path of your daily life”, says Ann Hamilton, who created a 4,350-square-foot artwork in downtown Manhattan’s Cortlandt Street station. Other artists who have contributed to the walls of the subway system include Yoko Ono, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Murray and Nick Cave, as part of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) Arts & Design programme — an initiative launched as an effort to rehabilitate the transport system after years of decline through the commissioning of original artwork. As the programme turns 40 this year, it can take credit for the creation of almost 400 permanent artworks that can be seen for a fare of $2.90.
Chloë Bass is one of the artists who answered the MTA’s call for submissions in March 2021, and was selected as one of the four finalists for Brooklyn’s Lorimer Street station. “They tell you the specific places that they are asking for the artwork, and they tell you how many,” Bass says. “In my case, it was three. I don’t think that they said that it specifically had to be mosaic, but it does have to be one of those MTA-approved, flat-wall materials, which are not that numerous.”
Bass came up with a triptych, each depicting different figures: two Orthodox Jews, a group of teenagers and two men engaged in conversation. A single sentence spans the three mosaics: “Whenever I’m pulled under by the weight of all I miss, I take some consolation that I have known, and may yet know, another life.” Her proposal was accepted. “You have to sign a contract that extends beyond your own death [regarding the work remaining on site], which may sound really depressing but is actually really cool,” she says. But Bass, like most commissioned subway artists, was unfamiliar with the medium of mosaic art. To bring her design into reality, she browsed a list of MTA-approved vendors, selected the mosaicist Stephen Miotto and gave him a call.
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