The subway gets you where need to go, but New Yorkers also know the system is one of the city’s hottest art galleries.
Now, using a new award-winning tool, you can explore all the subway’s prettiest art from the comfort of your home.
Stephanie Dang, a New York-based designer, and developer, created “Art Off the Rails,” a new interactive platform cataloging all of the art installations in dozens of stations overlaid on an easy-on-the-eyes map of the subway system.
On Wednesday, the MTA announced Dang had won its inaugural Open Data Challenge — inviting the public to use its trove of open data to create cool websites, apps, maps, data visualizations, or other kinds of media shedding light on how transit intersects with everyday life in the Big Apple.
“Before starting on this project, I hadn’t realized how many iconic parts of my commute were actually pieces of art,” said Dang. “Diving into the MTA’s permanent art catalog made me realize how much creativity surrounds us even in the most routine parts of our day.”
Major transit hubs like Times Square-42nd Street and Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center are suffused with artwork, but pieces can be found throughout the city, often inspired by their locales.
The 81st Street-Museum of Natural History stop on the B/C on the Upper West Side is filled with mosaics of extant and extinct animals, many of which are featured in taxidermy at the Museum of Natural History directly above it. The Bedford Avenue stop on the L in Williamsburg features a mosaic inspired by Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In East New York, the stainless steel “Urban Rail Garden” at Van Siclen Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue on the 3 celebrates the conversion of the neighborhood’s vacant lots into community gardens.
Every five years, the MTA devotes up to 1% of funds in its capital plan to new permanent art installations.
For her victory, Dang will be awarded with a piece of MTA memorabilia from the Transit Museum and had her work featured in a blog post on the transit agency’s website.
To check out “Art Off the Rails,” visit https://artworkmta.pages.dev/
