In one of New York City’s transport hubs, riders are now watched by hundreds if not thousands of glass and ceramic eyes.
Earlier this year, artist Fred Tomaselli created “February 25, 2024,” a collage imagining a Sunday New York Times front page announcing the death of Flaco the eagle-owl. Tomaselli envisioned the beloved bird with hundreds of colorful spiraling eyes and a befitting headline: “New Yorkers Mourn Neighbor They Could All Look Up To.” In Tomaselli’s latest work, he again draws New Yorkers closer to the world of aves, this time reaching a wider audience with a massive mosaic installation that will last beyond his lifetime.
New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts and Design commissioned Tomaselli in 2022 to create a permanent 680-square-foot mosaic series in Manhattan’s 14th Street subway station, which is notorious for its avenue block-long pathways facilitating commuter transfers from one line to another.
The MTA inaugurated Wild Things (2024) on Monday, November 4, just before Election Day, after a three-week installation. During election season, Tomaselli sold his bird-inspired work, including “February 25, 2024” (2024), to benefit the Kamala Harris campaign.
Tomaselli took a clear position in this year’s presidential race and has used his New York Times collage series to annotate front-page world news in addition to selling his work to fundraise for sustainability initiatives. The artist said he often uses his practice to address “the chaos and the pathologies of the world,” but this work is different.
“There’s no overt politics,” Tomaselli told Hyperallergic, “other than this idea that art is worth making, nature is worth preserving, and the natural world is strange and amazing.”
Tomaselli said he had “hit a burnout phase” with his more political art at the time he began designing his everlasting public work and felt depressed by it. He said he wanted to make “something to escape into the out of this ugly moment that we’re living through.”
“I just wanted to dive head first into this idea of the strangeness of the eternal natural world, an increasingly imperiled world,” Tomaselli said. “I wanted to bring this strangeness of the complexity and oddness that lives above ground and put it underground.
For his first-ever mosaic and permanent public installation in Manhattan, Tomaselli translated his mixed-media painting technique into tile and glass fragments with the help of the German stained glass manufacturer Mayer of Munich.
“We kind of assembled it out of Frankenstein bits of my older work,” Tomaselli said. “We made a lot of eyes by taking circular sheets of glass, laying them on top of each other, and then putting them in a blast furnace to melt them together.” He did the same with ceramic.
One mosaic presents riders with a psychedelic representation of a set of eyes diffusing into thousands of tinier eyes, resembling Tomaselli’s Flaco collage. In another, mosaic birds fly next to a spate of aggressive advertisements.
Tomaselli has lived off the L train, which passes through the station, for nearly 40 years. His studio is also located along the line and so was his son’s former school.
A personal project, Tomaselli said he felt “good” about the final product, but not without a twinge of melancholy.
“I know my son will probably be riding the L train long after I’m gone,” Tomaselli said. “When I finally saw it up there, I was like, ‘God, I’ve entered into the transit history of New York.’ Hundreds of thousands of people are going to pass by this every day, day in and day out, year after year, for 100 years, maybe more. ”
