Forget gallery walks. It’s all about the gallery ride. For the price of a subway fare, world-class art — from Yayoi Kusama’s colorful creations to William Wegman’s irresistible dog photographs — can be enjoyed in stations across New York City, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Over the decades, the MTA has commissioned more than 400 piece of public art to enliven New Yorkers’ daily commutes and longer treks. “Each work speaks in a unique way to a place,” Sandra Bloodworth, the longtime Director of MTA Art & Design told The Post. She’s the co-author, along with Cheryl Hageman, of the new book “Contemporary Art Underground: MTA Arts & Design New York” (Monacelli, out now).
It highlights more than 100 of the MTA’s newest commissions — mostly constructed with mosaics or larger pieces of metal or glass — added to the transit system from 2015 to 2023. Wanna check a few out? Grab your Metrocard and take one of these (mostly) subterranean sight-seeing tours mapped out by The Post with the aid of the new book. Tour 1: Williamsburg to Midtown Start at the Bedford Avenue L station and check out Marcel Dzama’s “No Less Than Everything Comes Together” (2021) .
The piece is inspired, in part, by Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which brought Dzama comfort when he first moved to NYC from Canada and felt lonely on his daily commutes from his apartment on the Lower East Side to his studio in Brooklyn. Take the Manhattan-bound L train to the.
