Granted, beautiful artwork adorns many of New York’s subway stations, but the works featured at the newly opened Second Avenue Subway are our current darlings – and with very good reason!
Just look at these fabulous life-size mosaics at the Second Avenue-72nd Street by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz. Based on staged photographs of people he knows, some ordinary, some made-up, others well-known Muniz named this series “Perfect Strangers” because that’s what people waiting for the train are: perfect strangers getting together for a brief moment before going about their separate ways.

On to Second Avenue-86th Street station, where the walls are adorned with Chuck Close’s ”Subway Portraits”, 12 large works based on his photo-realistic portrait paintings, transposed into mosaics or tiles.
Here are the portraits of the artist himself, artist Sienna Shields (whose identity it took me some digging to discover being unfamiliar with the local artistic milieu) and Lou Reed:


January 08th, 2017