Tatiana Arocha’s “Selva adentro” (The jungle inside) brings the rich biodiversity of her native Colombia to Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills. Her practice, rooted in fieldwork, blends drawings, photographs, and tracings into a visual language of tree bark, seeds, leaves and other natural elements. These observations are deepened through dialogue with Indigenous communities, whose knowledge of the land informs her work. Arocha describes these works as “an act of care—a gesture toward remembering the landscapes and communities that existed long before the city.”  

Set within the elevated station’s platform windscreens, “Selva adentro” comprises six digitally printed murals and was fabricated by Tom Patti Designs. The 24-panel glass artwork presents a series of reconstructed snapshots of lush greenery, animal life, and tropical forests collaged from Arocha’s visual archive. Using a monochromatic palette of black, white, and grey, Arocha highlights environmental fragility, while bodies of water rendered in gold leaf serve as shimmering reminders of human impact. On the Queens-bound side of the platform, birds like the egret and heron rest, eat, and soar through dense trees and swamps. A mural on the Manhattan-bound platform features a downed log with vegetation sprouting around it, evoking natural cycles of growth and decay. As riders approach the murals, they can also discover the delicate presence of smaller animals, such as camouflaged snakes, frogs, and spiders.  

Tatiana Arocha is a New York-born Colombian artist. Her art practice explores intimacy between people and land, rooted in personal memory and her immigrant experience, and centers on community through public art interventions and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Arocha was recently awarded a NYSCA Artist Grant, was a MacDowell Fellow in 2023, and was the recipient of the Annual Award for Excellence in Design by the Public Design Commission of the City of New York 2024—artist in residency at Residency Unlimited and Santa Fe Art Institute. Solo exhibitions include Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, Queens Botanical Garden, and site-specific installations at Brooklyn Public Library, BRIC, Brookfield Place/Winter Garden, Goethe-Institut Kolumbien, and Hilton Bogota Corferias.