If you stepped out of the downtown local 1 train at 50th Street in Manhattan, and if you were not distracted or running late, odds are that you might have noticed Alice. Yes, the one from Wonderland!
In blue mosaic on a white wall to the left of the turnstile, she peeks behind a curtain as White Rabbit looks on with his umbrella and pocketwatch. On the wall to the right of the turnstile, the Queen of Hearts joins them. If you were waiting for your train, you might have spotted two similar pieces of art animating the uptown side of the station.
“Look, that’s Mad Hatter,” Darryl Reilly pointed across the platform. He was a few minutes into leading his ‘NYC Subway Art Tour’, a walking and subway riding tour on which he takes people around to admire public art across the city’s subway system. ‘Alice: The Way Out’, he told me, is a series of four mosaic panels based on paintings by artist Liliana Porter, installed on the station walls in 1994.
I joined Reilly for the tour on a hot June afternoon. He met me, as he meets all his clients, at the McDonald’s on 51st Street and Broadway. I was the solo participant that day. It was too hot for bookings, he told me, assuring that the in-between subway rides would keep us cool. A tall man with a red cap and a playful smile, he referred to himself as a “mature tour guide” and a “lifelong New Yorker”, refusing to talk about his age. Born and raised in the Bronx, Reilly is a licensed tour guide, which means he was tested on his knowledge of the city by the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. We began the tour at the 50th st station, and his conversational voice turned into the sing-song tune of a cheerful kindergarten teacher. “ There are 472 stations and about 330 have artworks,” he said, stretching his words and turning the volume up several notches on account of passing trains.
In 2011, Reilly was working as a tour guide for a travel company when he first saw the Alice murals. To be precise, that was the first time he absorbed them, rather than just sparing a passing glance. During his Statue of Liberty tours, he started pointing out the art to tourists when waiting with them for the train at 50th st. He wondered why there weren’t any city tours taking people in and out of trains to admire subway art across stations. This led to daydreams and several rabbit holes. He researched, learned about the artists, walked around stations, and designed a route to launch the ‘NYC Subway Art Tour’. He received his first bookings six months later. Today, he has led tours for thousands of tourists, New Yorkers, visiting relatives of New Yorkers, schoolchildren, brand-new residents, and anyone in the process of falling in love with the city.
Reilly’s tour focuses on artwork installed by the MTA Arts and Design program, a department of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that commissions visual and performing arts across New York City’s transit system. Created in 1985, the department was a part of the MTA’s efforts to rehabilitate the subway network. On their website, MTA refers to the program as one of the world’s largest collections of public art, with more than 400 commissions by established, mid-career, and emerging artists. In addition to the permanent artworks installed at stations, the department oversees initiatives such as MTA Music, Poetry in Motion, photography installations, and posters. MTA dedicates up to 1% of the budget allotted for station rehabilitation and expansion projects to commission artworks. Open calls invite artists to submit ideas, and a panel of arts professionals and community representatives selects the finalists. They announce the calls for submission on their website here.
Throughout the tour, Reilly consistently pointed out the plaques next to each artwork. Like the plaques at any museum, they hold names–of the art, the artists, and the mosaic companies that transform their work into mesmerizing murals. “Fabricated by Leonardo Mosset,” says the one near ‘Alice’. “The point is that the artist did not come here and stand and glue these tiles in. The mosaic company designs it to fit on the wall,” he grinned.
We rode one stop from 50th St to Times Square to meet the ‘Revelers’ by Jane Dickson. Installed in 2008, there are 70 revelers throughout the station– life-size glass mosaic figures “depicting the cross-section of humanity, all the different people from around the world, different races, different ages, who come to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop,” Reilly told me. The mosaic figures are seen celebrating with party hats and party horns, their shadows visible in the snow, their heads surrounded by confetti. The closer you get to Times Square above, the higher the volume of confetti around the revelers underground.
It took me a month of living in New York City to smile at a piece of subway art, and another month to find the confidence (and the time) to slow down and stare at one– ‘Stationary Figures’ by William Wegman at 23rd street. It features 11 glass mosaic panels based on Wegman’s photographs of his dogs, posing like humans. “I wanted to create portraits of individual characters, people who you might see next to you on the platform,” Wegman is quoted on the MTA website. I didn’t know any of this last year, when I smiled at the dog in a flannel shirt and the dog in a red raincoat. On Reilly’s tour, I realized it’s their eyes that make the dogs look like us–too tired to reflect emotions as they wait for the next train with a vacant gaze. “We will joyously but briskly go to the last dog. Take a picture,” he shouted over the screech of our train now entering the station.
Under 42nd Street, in the corridor linking 5th Avenue to 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue, Reilly and I scooted closer to the walls to avoid interrupting a wave of commuters on their daily walk-but-run-but-actually-walk exercise. We were there to admire ‘Under Bryant Park’ by Samm Kunce, one of the largest subway artworks. True to its name, it features everything under the Park. Roots of trees, pipes, rocks, and words of famous authors. Wait, authors? “The New York Public Library has storage rooms with millions of books under Bryant Park, hence the quotes by Goethe, James Joyce, and others,” said Reilly. “Up ahead is Ovid, the Roman poet, look up,” he hollered at a fellow admirer who was taking a picture of ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill.”
Waiting at 50th St on a different day, I asked Sonia Velu, a young chemical engineer who has lived in the city for three years, if she notices all the art around us. “Oh yes,” she perked up. The brass coin sculptures inside 14th Street are her favorite. She worked as an intern in the city twice before moving here for work. “I feel like I spent time as a tourist when I was interning, and I would always notice the walls. But I might not notice them as much on my work commutes anymore,” she shrugged.
For born-and-bred New Yorker Scott Carlson, on the other hand, subway art never gets old. While waiting at 23rd Street station, the 62-year-old owner of an advertising agency told me that public art reflects the “culture and creativity of New York, giving local artists an opportunity to show their stuff.” The walls of the 81 St-Museum of Natural History station are his joy.
Chetty, another commuter whose surname drowned in the sound of an incoming train before he had to run, was nothing like Scott. A New Jersey resident, he often commutes to the city for work. 50th st and Penn Station are his most frequented stops, but he had never noticed any art. Not until I pointed ‘Alice’ out to him. “It looks nice though, for sure,” he smiled, thanked me, and ran to slide into the closing train gates.
Reilly believes most people in New York are like Chetty and know little about subway art. “I’ll meet someone who, for example, gets off 28th Street every single day. I’ll say they must know all about the toys. And they’ll have no idea what I am talking about.”
I am not sure about the generalization. To me, subway art seems forgiving. It’s there, waiting for one of those days when we are not being pulled away by a device, a thought, or a person–and we finally let the joy of free art wash over that subway grind. I have seen people doing a double-take to look at ‘Wild Things’ by Fred Tomaselli–the collection of pretty birds on 14 St-6 Av. I have also seen them run past ‘Losing My Marbles’ by Lisa Dinhofer on 42nd Street without a second glance. I have read Mayor Zohran Mamdani calling the New York City subway system his favorite museum. I have seen tourists slow down, in spite of an annoyed crawling queue behind them, to admire at least one of the 130 bronze statues at 14th Street – ‘Life Underground’ by Tom Otterness.
Reilly sprinkled fun facts and his interpretation of the art at regular intervals during the walk. The bronze statues, he said, were a “sly critique of capitalism” with characters like the man with a top hat and a dollar sign supervising construction workers. “Look at this, one of the police guarding some money,” he said, as a woman hurried over to lift her bag off a sculpture she had been using as a makeshift hanger.
‘Times Square Times: 35 Times’ by Toby Buonagurio, he pointed out, is a series of 35 glass blocks with ceramic artwork that highlight all recognizable aspects of Times Square–the food, fashion, entertainment, and street life.
On our way from 14th Street to 42nd Street, he pointed out ‘Portals’, a painting by artist Shadra Strickland inside the subway car. I told him that it grabs my attention every time I am present enough to look up from my Instagram-commute-scrolls. The art card features over 15 characters, which gives me a new one to focus on each time. Strickland is an illustrator, author, and educator from Atlanta, Georgia. “Growing up, we didn’t have a robust subway system. So, coming to New York, I was always amazed every time I got off the subway. It felt like I was in a new world,” she told me over a call from Baltimore, where she is currently working as the Chair of the Undergraduate Illustration Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Strickland came to New York in 2003 for graduate school at the School of Visual Arts. The amount of underground art in the city inspired her. She would look up names of artists on every art card, thinking how “cool” it would be to have her work up there one day. She defines art on the subway system as a way for artists to talk directly to an audience. “Commutes can be dreary. You’re on the train, and you’re hot, you’re miserable, and being able to look up and see some art to brighten your day makes it a nicer experience.”
Reilly does not have as strong a relationship with visual art as the artists do. His first love was performance art. “Obviously, I was interested enough,” he said, shrugging. After graduating from NYU with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Cinema Studies, he fell into tour guiding through a friend, beginning as a double-decker tour guide in the 1990’s while also pursuing acting and theatre. He has not acted in a play for 8 years; however, he continues to review plays on his website. “ That’s a reason to keep writing. You get free tickets to the shows as a critic,” he said, pulling out his phone to show me his work.
We ended the tour ‘The Return of Spring/The Onset of Winter’ by Jack Beal, ‘New York in Transit’ by Jacob Lawrence, and ‘Each One, Every One, Equal All’ by Nick Cave – all spread across different parts of Times Sq-42 St.
According to my phone, I walked 6185 steps during the tour—similar to the 6595 steps I walked the last time I was at MoMA. Which is my corny way of saying that in New York City, we are in an extraordinary museum every time we are underground. If we let it happen, pieces of art will sneak up on us and surprise us when we least expect them.
Like a poem in the ceiling of the corridor connecting 42 St-Port Authority Bus Terminal to Times Sq-42 St. Named ‘The Commuter’s Lament’ by Norman B Colp, the poem unfolds across the ceiling one line at a time, each mounted on beams a few feet apart, so that we have no option but to piece it together while walking. –“Overslept, so tired, if late, get fired. Why bother? Why the pain? Just go home, do it again.”
In the end, Reilly rushed back home, “There’s a very needy dog that needs to go outside,” he said, waving goodbye. I returned to the dogs on 23rd St for a few more pictures.
You can book his tour here.
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