Penn Station’s $1.6 billion Moynihan Train Hall features a spacious, light-filled atrium with a 92-foot-high glass skylight and soaring ceilings honoring the design of the original Penn Station, but as with any new transit hub, whether it’s a new subway station, airport terminal or a passenger hall like this one, New York calls on its amazing artists to decorate the walls, halls and floors and inspire travelers passing by.
On Wednesday, the Public Art Fund announced that Stan Douglas, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, and Kehinde Wiley were commissioned to create works for Moynihan that would offer a fresh perspective on the history and grandeur of the original Penn Station and James A. Farley Post Office and “a sense of wonder and humanity” that would evoke civic pride and delight for generations to come.
“Nothing could be more fitting for a great metropolitan transit hub than three astonishing works of art that stop us in our tracks,” said Nicholas Baume, Director & Chief Curator of Public Art Fund. “Each one dazzles with its sheer beauty, epic scale, and technical mastery. Collectively, they also remind us that great art comes from great ideas. Each artist has thought deeply about the history, context, significance, and future of this newly transformed place, creating brilliantly innovative works of art that allow us to see ourselves—past, present, and future—in a truly civic space.”
Below are the three artworks you’ll see inside Moynihan.
Inside the ticketed waiting room, there is a series of nine photographic panels of “remarkable but forgotten” moments of history from the original Penn Station, including singer and comedian Bert Williams doing an impromptu vaudeville show during the epic snowstorm of 1914; outlaw and folk hero Celia Cooney meeting crowds at Penn Station in 1924 after being arrested; thousands of Communist party members and supporters gathering to greet Angelo Herndon, a persecuted labor organizer and champion of racial justice in 1934; three scenes depicting design interventions in the original station’s waiting room; the final moments between soldiers and their loved ones before deployment during World War II; and the soundstage from director Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 love story The Clock, starring Judy Garland.
Douglas photographed live actors in period costumes and combined them with digitally recreated interiors of the demolished station. “The cinematic quality of each scene revives these historic moments in uncanny detail, revealing the architectural landmark as a grand theater for the millions of human dramas that animate civic spaces and imbue them with memory and meaning,” the Public Art Fund says.
On view on the 33rd Street midblock entryway ceiling, Wiley’s vivid, handpainted artwork is a backlit, stained-glass triptych that’s inspired by Renaissance and Baroque paintings. It’s a modern take on Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s 18th-century ceiling frescoes, but features young, Black New Yorkers in poses inspired by breakdance. The subjects inhabit the sky alongside clouds, pigeons, and a jet plane, using the urban setting of New York City to “create a surrealist dreamscape that advances a narrative of buoyancy, possibility, and survival,” the Public Art Fund says.
The Hive byElmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset)
Photograph: Courtesy Elmgreen & Dragset, Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy Empire State Development and Public Art Fund, NY
On view on the 31st Street midblock entryway ceiling, Elmgreen & Dragset’s has placed an upside-down cityscape with 91 small buildings mounted on the ceiling like glowing, 9-foot-tall stalactites, or like a hive of buildings that pay homage to the cities we live in. In total, they weigh more than 30,000 pounds and are lit by 72,000 LEDs. “As visitors pause on entering the train hall, The Hive celebrates the new perspectives and interconnectedness that cities and travel provide,” the Public Art Fund says.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
