Quick, name a museum that’s open 24 hours and visited by more than four million people every day. You probably weren’t thinking of the New York City Subway, but a staggering 400 permanent artworks have been commissioned across the system over the past four decades, earning it the moniker of “New York’s underground art museum.” More than 100 were completed in the past decade and now star in Contemporary Art Underground: New York MTA Arts & Design (Phaidon), a book that journeys across the city’s five boroughs to survey the blue-chip art by the likes of Nick Cave, Sarah Sze, Derrick Adams, and Yayoi Kusama that have made museum-quality experiences part of the daily commute.
Encompassing miniature sculptures to monumental murals and years-long reconstruction initiatives, the book highlights how each work engages with and informs its surroundings. With chapters focused on materials and behind-the-scenes studio visits, it also reveals how artworks are interpreted in mediums chosen for their resilience in a transit environment, like colorful mosaics and dazzling stained glass windows. Remember, the New York City Subway is the Western Hemisphere’s busiest rapid transit system and carried more than two billion riders in 2023. The artworks coalesce to paint an exuberant portrait of the city and its many stripes of life. “These works remind us of the power transit has to bring people together,” Janno Lieber, the MTA’s chair, writes in the preface. “Our system is where millions of New Yorkers and tourists alike commingle daily and prove out the world’s greatest experiment in tolerance and diversity.”
