The Art of Public Transportation
This program is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs.
Most art is exhibited in stately, contemplative spaces which one chooses and often pays to visit—not in bustling, cavernous public spaces where everyone is either rushing or waiting, and which are rarely considered as destinations in their own right. But as a recent string of public art successes from Metro Art has demonstrated, commuters of all kinds deeply appreciate when their cultural experience is as prioritized as their transport.
The cohort of large-scale, permanent contemporary works across the downtown connector stations, along the K Line, and thanks in part to the new LACMA’s gravitational pull, the D Line—plus the D’s forthcoming further west side stations—elevate the transportation infrastructure into something that feels less like an afterthought, activating its transitional spaces and signaling not only that the city takes public transit seriously, but public art as well. And my own informal poll of transit cops revealed that they are enjoying it, too, and several of the more colorful works have emerged as early favorites among the force.
The city is a palimpsest of decades of shifting cultural dynamics, and for many of these artists the specific social, cultural, and geographical history of the neighborhood inspired their creative choices. For others their projects have as much if not more to do with the quirks of the architecture and its intended functions as a space contoured by constant motion. Yet public art also demands material permanence, and shifting from sometimes delicate studio materials to industrial mediums like ceramic, glass mosaic, or alchemized metal was a choose your own adventure that played out differently for each of them.
For her monumental photography and drawing based installations, Fran Siegel (Wilshire/La Brea) took a psychogeographical and quixotically literal approach. Her modular tile work responds to a specific quirk of the city’s street layouts—the realization that Wilshire’s east-west axis physically pivots away from the colonial Spanish grid of downtown. She used the seasonal path of daylight from sunrise to sunset to structure the composition, splicing that solar line with images of the raw topography, dirt, and bones excavated by Metro during the deep tunneling process. “I considered this space being underground and the disoriented rider,” Siegel states. “I wanted to reveal what they wouldn’t normally be able to see. For example, I incorporated images of what was found underground, like the mammoth bones.”
“Knowing that I was going to be on the platform level gave me an opportunity to think very specifically about that space,” says Susan Silton (Wilshire / Fairfax). "It’s where the trains come in and it’s deep in the ground,” she says, describing both the intense noise and sudden quiet that rolls by in layers and waves. “I wanted those things to be textual. I wanted you to have something to hold on to or to decipher,” she says. “Not just once, but every time you go back." For Silton, making the reader work to decipher the text inside the rhythmic color riot of WE, OUR, US—an abstract pattern of stripes that flashes and blurs when you are flying past on a train, but reveals its hidden words the moment you stand still and look—mirrors the actual work required to truly share a society.
But this excavation of the landscape isn't just geological or social; it can also be a deliberate disruption of the cultural narratives layered into the history of the city itself. Todd Gray (Wilshire / La Cienega) In Mining the Archives: S. Charles Lee, Architect, Gray moved away from his signature juxtapositional style of interlocking photographs, and instead dug into the cultural history of this stretch of the Wilshire corridor, near to the Fairfax District where he grew up. Feeling inspired by his love of the architecture of what is now the Saban Theater, visited UCLA’s S. Charles Lee architecture archive and culled particularly fascinating sketches and plans before recombining them into a sort of ghostly music score honoring—and adding to—the long and storied history of architecture on the Miracle Mile.
For artist and scholar Ken Gonzales-Day (Wilshire / Fairfax) the question was both more whimsical and urgently literal. “The palette was drawn from the colors reflected in a single bubble from the surface of the Tar Pits. Blue, black, white, and rainbow colored highlights,” Gonzales-Day says of his monumental photo-based murals. “I began by playfully asking myself, 'What if LACMA sank into the Tar Pits and these works were discovered in some future time, like so many other objects excavated from the tar pits over the years?’”
In Urban Excavation: Ancestors, Avatars, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Casts, Copies, Deities, Figures, Funerary Objects, Gods, Guardians, Mermaids, Metaphors, Mothers, Possessions, Sages, Spirits, Symbols, and Other Objects, Gonzales-Day reviewed over 4,000 sculptural items, before narrowing the selection down to the mere 70 photographed and included in the work. Spanning African art, the ancient Americas, Egyptian antiquities, and East Asian artifacts, the artist arranged them into the meteor-like forms hovering in massive, high-contrast glass tile murals that line the concourse walls, reflecting the station as a literal and metaphorical archeological site.
Navigating that kind of scope and breadth among the projects means encountering the machinery of a massive public agency, where creative intuition meets structural engineering, committee approvals, and municipal mediation. This is where long-time head of the Metro Art department, Maya Emsden’s institutional perspective intersects with the artists' philosophy. “Transit infrastructure—especially underground—is heavily engineered and has systemized elements like platforms, escalators, signage, faregates, etc.,” Emsden explains. “So the art plays a critical role in humanizing not just the infrastructure but the experience of the journey itself.”
Mark Dean Veca (Wilshire/La Brea) managed this material mediation not by fighting the parameters, but by surrendering to them completely—tailoring his graphic language (and somehow resisting the temptation to hand-draw the whole thing directly on the station walls), and treating the entire kiln-fired glass, steel-enamel fabrication process as one massive screenprint. His cathedral-like work is surreal and soaring, with interlacing patterns and a mysterious illusion of radiance—and like all the other artists, remains even in translation very much in the core of his signature style. “I chose to approach it as a print project,” he says. “It’s a unique, 1/1, monumental print made in layers very much the way a silkscreen print would be made.”
“Metro Art staff work alongside transportation planners and designers to ensure thoughtful, impactful art opportunities are woven into project plans from the earliest possible stages (often a decade before artists are selected),” Emsden notes. “For these three D Line stations we listened very carefully to our riders and stakeholder communities in these areas and what we consistently heard from them is that they wanted 'world class well established artists' for these stations, that they wanted 'a holistic approach' and to 'elevate the conversation'. And they asked that we 'let the artists surprise us.’”
For artists on other Metro lines like Jaime Scholnick (Expo / Crenshaw), that same philosophy is operating in a very different community experiencing its own radical shifts. “Layered Histories is a time capsule of the area surrounding the station,” she reflects. “As this area has developed, a lot of the shops are gone. There are still iconic businesses i.e. The King of Kuts barber shop and Madame Kofo’s but the area is quickly changing. I hope that commuters and visitors can see themselves in the imagery and get a sense of this neighborhood and its history.”
When she was conceptualizing her commission, Scholnick worked with photographer Sally Coates and spent a lot of time in the neighborhood. “We would go into restaurants, stop people on the street, go into shops and ask people ‘what would you like to see on your Metro?’,” she recalls. “Their answers were heartfelt and specific. ‘You need to photograph the drum circle, the African Marketplace, the mall, the low-rider cars on Sunday, and on and on. They also told us their versions of the history of the area from the lore of Lucky Baldwin to the care of Japanese members of the community’s farmland when they were interned during WWII. Everyone we spoke to had something to say,” she remembers. “Each time we spoke to people I came away with a sense of the deep pride they held for their community.”
Kim Schoenstadt (Fairview Heights) did much the same. “My public and installation work always responds to the place where it lives,” she says. “I begin with researching the location and history of the place. I start by walking and driving the area, then researching the history of the buildings that catch my eye, using local libraries, talking with members from the community, and digging into local history archives. There is never a dearth of information.” Along the K Line there are many architectural highlights, from the Centinela Adobe, Randy’s doughnuts, the Forum, Brolly Hut, an old drive-in theater, and even the original train car whose tracks were removed for the new train was included in the work. “By including existing and past buildings and infrastructure, memory was at the top of my mind,” she says.
“Standing, walking, or rushing through this middle space, I hope that they will see figures rise up from the darkness while others drift from the light—as they themselves travel from cool dark tunnels to sun bleached sidewalks,” Gonzales-Day muses. “And perhaps remember, that though it is not always easy, we are all free to choose our own path.”
For information on these and all other sites and artists in the Metro Arts program, visit: art.metro.net.
