In New York City’s Subway System, There’s Beauty in the Mundane

The New York City subway commute can be unpleasant: the rats, the packed cars, the schedule changes, the smells. But CONTEMPORARY ART UNDERGROUND: MTA Arts & Design New York (The Monacelli Press, $60),by Sandra Bloodworth and Cheryl Hageman, invites us to see extraordinary beauty in the mundane.

Showcasing the more than 100 site-specific projects that have been commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the city’s subway platforms, overpasses and tunnels since 2015, this book also documents the artists’ creative processes in drawings, models and photographs.

Along the walls of the B/D train station on 167th Street, Rico Gatson created “Beacons,” eight portraits of Black and Latino leaders with connections to the Bronx. He modeled each mosaic on black-and-white photographs, adding bright rays “coming out of a Pan-African sensibility of black, red and green,” Gatson has said, “but expanding with yellow and orange and sometimes evolving into silver and gold.”

Ann Hamilton’s “CHORUS” (2018) is a white marble mosaic of words taken from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, “a song stitched step by step” along a wall of the No. 1 train platform at the World Trade Center Cortlandt station.

In the Q train station on 72nd Street, Vik Muniz created “Perfect Strangers” (2017) — life-size depictions of dozens of his fellow riders in colorful mosaics. “People come to New York to see the attractions,” Muniz wrote in his proposal for the project. “But one of the city’s main attractions is its people: diverse, absurdly casual and original.”

The multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith created her first-ever mosaic, a five-part project in 2022, for the new Long Island Rail Road station at Grand Central Madison. Underground, between entrances to the tracks, Smith’s intricate, large-scale works depict natural scenes in the world outside: sunlight hitting the East River, a deer among reeds, turkeys in a forest.

In his signature style of large, close-up faces (including that of his wife, Ada) against bright-hued backgrounds, the New York native Alex Katz’s 2019 series “Metropolitan Faces” decorates the mezzanine of the 57th Street F station with colorful glass paintings.

The book travels aboveground to show work on a number of Metro-North and L.I.R.R. lines, including the kaleidoscopic laminated glass panels based on watercolors by Mary Judge along an overpass at the Wyandanch station.

The stunning works documented in the book almost make you wish for a train delay.