Riders passing through Los Angeles’ three new underground subway stations might reasonably think they’ve entered an underground museum. the said Regional Connector, which opened on June 16 in a ceremony at the Japanese American National Museum, sees the addition of three new subway stations to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s network in downtown Los Angeles: the Little Tokyo Station/ Arts District, Historic Broadway Station and Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill Station. The stations feature eight new permanent artworks commissioned through the Metro Art program.
At Little Tokyo/Arts District, the station’s entrance pavilion includes Harmony (2023), a luminous intervention by San Francisco-based artist Clare Rojas that incorporates translucent abstract shapes and moon cycles. On the Docks, the 14-panel mural cycle by Los Angeles-based artist Audrey Chan Will Power Allegory (2023) fantastically depicts events and communities related to Little Tokyo, Skid Row, Bronzeville and more.
Audrey Chan Will Power Allegory (2023) at Little Tokyo Station/Arts District Courtesy of the artist and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Travelers entering or exiting the historic Broadway station will do so via an entrance pavilion adorned with text in different colors and languages, a site-specific work by the Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers title The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido”, Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program”, La Causa) (2023). The titular phrases are frequent chants at the protests, which often take place nearby, as the historic Broadway train station is near City Hall, county and federal courthouses, the headquarters of the police department of Los Angeles and other civic institutions.
“I seek to reflect the diverse communities that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and rights,” Bowers said in a statement.
by Andrea Bowers The People United (“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido”, Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; “Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program”, La Causa) (2023) at Historic Broadway Station Courtesy of the artist and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Underground at Historic Broadway, Los Angeles-born and based artist Mark Steven Greenfield created the large, radiant abstract mural, Red Car Requiem (2023). He intends the work to serve as a “whimsical energy abstraction” of the city’s Pacific Electric Red Cars, an extensive network of electric streetcars that connected downtown and outlying Los Angeles between 1901 and 1961.
On the station platforms, photographer Clarence Williams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, while working as a photographer for The Los Angeles Times— has collaborated with the poet Ursula Rucker on a series of haikus, which are juxtaposed with her photographs. The texts and images, titled Migrations (2023), aim to evoke the experience of migration, in particular that which he documented in 2005, by photographing Louisianans who came to Los Angeles after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
by Claire Rojas Harmony (2023) at Little Tokyo Station/Arts District Courtesy of the artist and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
At Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill, Ohio-based concept artist Ann Hamilton has wrapped the street-level exterior of the station in an abstract pattern, over-under-over (2023), intended to evoke an enveloping thread that the artist sees as akin to the many strands of the public transport system. Above the station platform stands an installation featuring two large-scale murals by Los Angeles artist Mungo Thomson, Negative space (STScI-2015-02) (2023). The murals feature reverse images of photos taken in 2015 by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Perhaps most striking at the Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill station is the multi-storey mosaic by Pearl C. Hsiung, prismatic top (2023), features geyser-like bursts of color stretching across a monochrome landscape skyward. “I wanted to celebrate the disparate but harmonious cosmos of images, languages, cultures and relationships that make up the history of this region, it’s an ever-changing present and an ever-changing future,” said the Los Angeles-based Taiwanese artist in a statement.
Pearl C. Hsiung’s prismatic top (2023) at Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Station Courtesy of the artist and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Artists who received commissions for the new stations were selected through an open process following recommendations from an advisory panel of leading Los Angeles art-world figures that included the artists. Charles Gaines and Daisy Villa, The Broad curator Ed Schad and former Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles assistant curator Lanka Tattersall.
These major additions to Los Angeles’ transit art offering follow similar huge commissions that were unveiled in New York earlier this year with the opening of the Grand Central Madison Terminal. This vast complex far below Midtown Manhattan includes large scale wall mosaics by Yayoi Kusama and Kiki Smith.
