Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New YorkThe 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.Destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cortlandt Street station reopened as WTC Cortlandt in 2018 with Hamilton’s mosaic, which interweaves passages from the US Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The artwork is white-on-white marble, covering the walls on both sides of the tracks. The site is uncharacteristically serene and clean for New York. “If you put those words in your pocket, they’re aspirational,” Hamilton says. “They’re what we hope for in public life and social relations.”“The artworks have to be very durable,” says US artist Fred Tomaselli, whose “Wild Things” suite of mosaics was unveiled last November at Manhattan’s 14th Street station complex, spanning the distance beneath Sixth and Seventh Avenues. “I mean, you know what the subway is like. I’m sure people are going to throw every bodily fluid on it known to man, and theoretically, one just has to hose it off.” Tomaselli’s “Wild Things” features six vibrant mosaics with bird motifs. One of them depicts a pair of piercing owl eyes, made up of tiles known as tesserae. As a local, Tomaselli knows the city’s subway is flush with eccentric characters, so he has back-up tiles in case someone decides to take out their day’s frustration on his art. “In the event that somebody decides that the owl is giving them secret messages from another dimension and it’s trying to control their mind and they go at it with a hammer, we can fix it,” he says. The durability of the materials reduces the need for frequent restoration. MTA personnel carry out routine cleaning; if repairs are necessary, they seek out the original fabricator.Commissioning artwork for the subway’s sprawling collection typically begins with an open call for proposals on the MTA’s website, where artists are asked to upload a portfolio of their work. A group of arts-industry professionals and community representatives then narrow the list down to the finalists, who are invited to submit location-specific proposals. 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 a 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. Miotto has been building mosaics since he was a child. “Stephen is a mosaic genius,” Bass says. Miotto invited her to visit his studio in Carmel, upstate New York, to see if they got along. “We hit it off immediately,” she recalled. “We started making aesthetic decisions on the spot.” Bass had designed her proposal for Lorimer Street digitally, but “the mosaic is a completely different medium”, Miotto says. “We don’t want to just make a strict copy of your work — we have to translate it into another medium.” There are decisions to be made about colour (Miotto has more than 2,000 options to choose from in his studio), but also the properties and unique textures of each tessera. The handmade glass is baked in an oven. After, as it cools, metal oxides often come to the surface and create variety in the crust of the glass. That crust can be interesting to use in the mosaic, if the designer agrees. “We’re artisans and not artists, and so we make art for artists,” Miotto says.The next step is getting the mosaic on to the subway wall. Rather than assemble a floor-to-ceiling artwork out of individual tesserae, in a bustling station, Miotto does part of the work in his studio by mounting it in sections on mesh. Then the sections are assembled together in the station, like “a huge jigsaw puzzle”, he says.Miotto’s first MTA project was in the late 1980s, after an arson incident in the Bronx. Shortly before 1am on March 15 1989, three young men shoved a handwritten note into the tray of a token booth at the Intervale Avenue subway stop. It read: “Give us the cash or we will burn….” The rest was indecipherable. When the clerk failed to respond to their demand in a timely manner, they poured flammable liquid on the booth, torched it and disappeared into the night. (The clerk suffered only minor injuries.) The MTA announced plans to close the station after the attack, but locals protested. “At night, one more block to walk on foot can be the difference between life and death in this area,” a commuter told the New York Times. The MTA ended up rebuilding the station at a cost of $5.2mn. The renovations included two mosaics — the first two of the more than 70 works that Miotto would go on to construct for the MTA.New Yorkers frequently complain about the city’s subway, from a lack of maintenance to concerns about safety, but it was far worse in the 1980s, when the network was plagued with track derailments, fires and delays. Today, a New York subway car can expect to travel an average of 115,000 miles before breaking down, a metric the MTA calls “Mean Distance Before Failure”. In the early ’80s, the metric was about six per cent of that — less than 7,000 miles. The chair of the MTA at the time, Richard Ravitch, commissioned a review of the entire system to estimate how much it would cost to restore the subway to a “state of good repair”. The price tag was $14bn over 10 years. Conventional wisdom dictates that if you need money, you generally go up the chain of command until you find whoever controls the purse strings. In the MTA’s case, that is not a straightforward exercise: it’s not clear who’s ultimately in charge. The MTA is neither a state nor a city agency. It is, legally speaking, an independent corporation with a board of directors (appointed by the governor). Funding comes from the federal, state and city levels and in various forms: grants, bonds and cash. In the end, it was a combination of intense lobbying, some clever financial engineering and a media tour to ramp up the public pressure on the governor that secured Ravitch the money he needed to begin capital improvements. But in 1983 he resigned, in order to “resume a more normal life with [his] family”. A former CIA officer named Bob Kiley took over from Ravitch and started work on the improvements. He implemented a zero-tolerance fare evasion policy and oversaw the replacement of many decrepit cars. It was under his tenure that the Arts & Design programme was launched and a portion of the funds began flowing into the creation of artwork. (Today, the allocation is up to one per cent of the cost of building or renovating a station.)The subway system, however, was already covered in “artwork”— graffiti from floor to ceiling, wall to painted wall. But the MTA wanted commissioned work. Kiley increased the MTA’s anti-graffiti budget, and hired security around the yards where subway cars would get sprayed. In 1989, the MTA proudly celebrated its victory in the “graffiti war” after removing the last painted train from service (though today, trains are still being tagged). But it’s hard to impress New Yorkers; one rider told the New York Times that the MTA should worry more about crime than aesthetics. “Nobody was ever raped by a graffito,” he said.Last autumn, the Metropolitan Museum of Art included three permanent artworks from the MTA in Flight into Egypt, an exhibition that explored how Black artists have engaged with ancient Egypt in their work over the past 150 years. But, in order to view the MTA artworks, Met visitors had to leave the building and head uptown to 125th Street in Harlem. “What’s really special about these installations is that they reflect the community that they’re based in, but they also, of course, shape the experience of the people who live in those communities,” says Akili Tommasino, associate curator for modern and contemporary art at the Met. Tomassino grew up in Brooklyn; the subway was his ticket to the city, “a means for adolescent freedom”, he says. To him, the MTA and the Met are interdependent. The Met is an institution created for the people of New York City — and the MTA is how they get there. “There is almost an expectation from New Yorkers that they’ll have the opportunity to experience exciting works of art, of course, in our great museums, but also in our parks, plazas, and other spaces,” says Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund, a non-profit that facilitates art installations throughout the city (above ground). “People [in New York] sacrifice a lot, often, to live in small apartments. But I think a big reason that is worth doing is a cultural enrichment that public art is an important part of.”What’s your favourite artwork on the New York City subway? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
