(NEW YORK, NY — October 6, 2025) MTA Arts & Design, one of the world’s largest public-art collections, is marking 40 years of delivering public art across the MTA system with a yearlong celebration to feature commemorative projects and new work. Started in 1985 and encompassing a broad spectrum of artistic activity—including poetry, live musical performances, posters, photography, digital art, events, and more than 400 site-specific contemporary artworks—MTA Arts & Design is a visible expression of the MTA’s commitment to promoting safety, respect, and an enhanced environment for riders.
“For forty years, MTA Arts & Design has championed art everywhere for everyone, creating moments of delight for the millions of riders who rely on MTA services daily,” said Tina Vaz, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “As part of this anniversary year, we are thrilled to present a range of special programming in station environments, subway cars, and beyond, while we continue to deliver transformative experiences of art across the system.”
The 40th-anniversary celebration kicks off today with the launch of a new permanent artwork and three new digital-art commissions:
New Permanent Artwork
A metal sculpture by Jorge Luis Rodriguez debuts as part of the Park Avenue Viaduct Replacement project, which rehabilitates historic train infrastructure and will allow Metro-North Railroad to continue providing safe and reliable train service for generations to come. Entitled Harlem Melodic Moments, Rodriguez’s dynamic celebration of East Harlem’s rich musical legacy—salsa, bolero, Latin jazz, jazz blues, gospel, be-bop, hip-hop, rap, and other danceable fusion genres—spans the east and west sides of Park Avenue at East 116 Street. Fabricated in aluminum, the monumental work measures 6 feet high and 96 feet long on each side, totaling more than 1,150 square feet.
New Digital Artworks
A Data Love Letter to the Subway by Giorgia Lupi will launch on 50 screens at Fulton Center and run two minutes at the top of every hour through December 2025. Using data culled from sources including the MTA Open Data program and online “missed connection” message boards, the work visualizes each MTA subway line as a character with unique qualities extracted from its related data. Imaginatively animating each line’s age, length, and path, Lupi explores their interwoven encounters with commuters and one another. By turning the prosaic familiar into a poetic narrative, Lupi’s Love Letter reveals the connections that hum in the background of our shared urban life. The work is realized with technical support from Westfield RISE and ANC Sports.
On October 7, two new digital artworks will launch on the large-scale, 5-channel screens of the Grand Central Madison concourse. Remember, Gullah Island, an alternate-reality work by Jazsalyn featuring evocative digital renderings, takes a visual journey to Gullah Geechee Corridor, Atlantic coastal plains stretching from North Carolina to Florida that hold special cultural significance to African American communities. Embedded with notions of home and belonging, Remember, Gullah Island invites commuters to pause in their daily journey and connect with stories of departure, arrival, resilience, and cultural perseverance. The piece will run every six minutes through March 2026.
Video installation Breathe with Me by Kate Bae , in collaboration with Hyo Jung Bea, immerses viewers in a poetic underwater world. Inspired by diving with haenyeo, women divers from South Korea’s Jeju Island, the work explores human and climate vulnerability as divers release their breath, walk along the sea floor, and reach toward one another. Through captivating underwater footage, Bae and Bea offer an alternative form of movement to the rush of urban life—one that allows for intentional connection and a moment for a deep breathing. Breathe with Me is supported in part by Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. The work will run every six minutes through March 2026.
Additional Programing
Through September 2026, MTA Arts & Design will mark its 40th anniversary with a wide range of ongoing and special programming including new station art, poetry and posters in subway cars and on platforms, and photography exhibitions plus live poetry readings, special musical performances, and more.
On Wednesday, October 8 from 9am-6pm, MTA Music presents special performances by Anthony Carrera (handpan/guitar), Angel Cruz (vocals), and Inti and the Moon (Rumba/flamenco folk), in recognition of Hispanic Heritage Month.
As part of Open House New York Weekend, October 17-19, Arts & Design will lead four special “Art Everywhere for Everyone" tours, with stops along the Pelham Line in the Bronx, the Jamaica Line, the , and Grand Central Madison. Tourgoers will have the opportunity to visit artworks at transit stations, meet the artists, and learn about Arts & Design’s commissioning process and the stories behind each site-specific artwork created for the diverse communities and riders of the MTA system.
Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.
A special 40th-anniversary logomark, designed with in-kind support from Pentagram, will be featured in all Arts & Design materials through September 2026.
ABOUT MTA ARTS & DESIGN
MTA Arts & Design encourages the use of public transportation by providing visual and performing arts in the metropolitan New York area. The Percent for Art program is one of the largest and most diverse collections of site-specific public art in the world, with more than 400 commissions by world-famous, mid-career and emerging artists. Arts & Design produces Graphic Arts, Digital Art, photographic Lightbox exhibitions, as well as live musical performances in stations through its MUSIC (Music Under New York) program, and the Poetry in Motion program in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. It serves the millions of people who rely upon MTA subways and commuter trains and strives to create meaningful connections between sites, neighborhoods, and people.
ABOUT JORGE LUIS RODRIGUEZ
Jorge Luis Rodriguez arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1963. Following a career in advertising, Rodriguez was educated at the School of Visual Arts and New York University where he earned a master’s degree in Sculpture. He was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1980 and created Growth, the first New York City Percent for Art permanent artwork commission in 1985. Rodriguez taught sculpture at the Kingsborough Community College and School of Visual Arts. His work has been displayed at the historic gallery Just Above Midtown, El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Arts.
ABOUT GIORGIA LUPI
Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning designer and a partner at Pentagram’s New York studio. Trained as an architect at Università degli Studi di Ferrara, she earned her PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano; in 2022 she received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Lupi was the 2022 recipient of the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the 2025 recipient of the Compasso d'Oro for her visual op-ed My Life with Long Covid. Her work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. In her practice, Lupi and her team create vibrant visual data-driven narratives across print, environmental, and digital media that forge new insight and appreciation of people, ideas, and organizations.
ABOUT JAZSALYN
Jazsalyn is an artist and researcher working where fiction and reality collide. Through alternative media and re-indigenization, her practice considers issues regarding data loss, memory restoration, and Ancestral Intelligence. She develops long-term projects with game engines, algorithmic processes, and video art to explore counter-futures and complex human-to-nonhuman knowledge systems. As a lecturer at The New School, she has built curricula on African and Diaspora rituals as speculative technology. She is the Artistic Director of the experimental curatorial project Black Beyond, where she curates exhibitions and experiences to envision alternate realities for (b)lackness. Her work has been supported by Serpentine Arts Technologies, New Museum, Pioneer Works, Creative Time, and more. She has been featured in publications such as Cultured Magazine, It’s Nice That, Vogue, and The New Yorker.
ABOUT KATE BAE
Kate Bae is a multidisciplinary immigrant artist working between New York City and South Korea. Her practice spans painting, site-specific installations, and sculptural works, with a strong focus on material exploration and transformation. She experiments with layering, casting, and peeling paint on unconventional surfaces, creating works that embody fragmentation, memory, and identity. Recently, inspired by diving with Jeju’s haenyeo (Sea Women), Bae has expanded her work into video and installation, exploring the fragile, rhythmic qualities of water. These new mediums allow her to investigate the porous boundaries between body, environment, and memory. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of Women’s Cactus for the Arts and has exhibited at the Jeju Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Wausau Museum. Her work has been supported by the Puffin Foundation, the Real Art Award, and the Ora Lerman Trust. She has participated in residencies at the Golden Foundation, MASS MoCA Studios, and the Wassaic Project.
ABOUT HYO JUNG BEA
Hyo Jung Bea is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice centers on the body’s connection to trauma, labor, displacement, and healing. Drawing from her own experiences of migration, illness, and cultural dislocation, Bea reinterprets the body as a space of both fragility and strength. Through poetic and visceral imagery, she confronts emotional and physical discomfort, often embodying symbolic forms—such as a hedgehog covered in thumbtacks—to explore themes of fear, intimacy, and protection. Bea’s recent work is profoundly influenced by the haenyeo , the sea women of Jeju Island, whose strength, silence, and interdependence with the ocean serve as metaphor and inspiration. She studied Visual Arts at Seoul National University of Technology, holds a BFA from CUNY Hunter College, and earned her MFA in Sculpture from Jeju National University. She has exhibited at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeju Museum of Art, and the Insa Art Center (Seoul).