Travelers are now welcomed back to Penn Station in New York by the sight of contemporary art and architectural features, both of which form part of the newly-opened Moynihan Train Hall.
Built at a cost of $1.6 billion, the 255,000-square-foot space is located across the street from the main station in the historic James A. Farley Post Office. It will serve as a central hub for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers. The building boasts vaulted, 92-foot-high ceilings and a one-acre sky-lit atrium, making it an architectural marvel. Moreover, it’s the site for stunning art installations by Kehinde Wiley, Stan Douglas, and the creative duo, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. These artworks were commissioned through a partnership between Empire State Development and Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to public art initiatives.
Elmgreen and Dragset’s The Hive is a fantastical inverted cityscape inspired by iconic buildings in New York City and cities worldwide, creatively woven into unique architectural designs. This ceiling installation can be found at the midblock entrance at 31st Street. Furthermore, Wiley’s Go adorns the ceiling of the 33rd Street midblock entrance with a backlit, hand-painted, stained-glass triptych. This artwork evokes the grandeur of decorative Renaissance and Baroque painting, showcasing young Black New Yorkers in lively poses reminiscent of breakdancing, coexisting with clouds, pigeons, and a jet plane.
Douglas’s photo series, Penn Station’s Half Century, is displayed in four 22-foot-long panels in the waiting room adjacent to the main boarding concourse. This remarkable series of nine photographic panels reconstructs forgotten moments from the history of the original Pennsylvania Station (1910-1963). To create this installation, Douglas captured live actors in period costume and combined them with digitally recreated interiors of the demolished station.
“Nothing could be more fitting for a great metropolitan transit hub than three astonishing works of art that stop us in our tracks,” says Nicholas Baume, director and 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.”