Arts for Transit and Urban Design

50th Street

Matt Mullican

Untitled, 1989

Etched granite mural in entrance, sponsored by New York Communications Center Associates

Artist Matt Mullican created an 8-foot by 68-foot sandblasted black granite mural that presents a time-line of the history of the station site, atop which sits an office tower. (The subway station was rehabilitated in concert with the office development.) Mullican employs an iconographic visual vocabulary through which he reveals the site's past as rural, occupied by a cabin, and as a previous site of Madison Square Garden. Depictions of maps and aerial views are also part of the large mural. Mullican's pictographs reward the repeat visitor with layers of meaning as the piece is viewed again and again. Mullican communicates through a simplified visual system, but his signs provide deeper meaning to those who look.