In addition to integrating artwork at all Metro stations, we also offer transit riders the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of artworks through multiple exhibition series. The unique, site-specific formats range from neighborhood posters and photography to community art banners and most recently on TAP cards and digital screens at station platforms.
This portrait of our metropolis offers a sense of both place and displacement, and underscores the need for a thriving public transportation system. The series also gives us a sense of where we are personally and on the level of urban planning.
The seven energetic images selected for this series were produced by a photogram process and tell stories that reflect the idea of journeys, passages, memories, and thresholds that define our lives.
Namonai ike in Japanese means, “a pond with no name.” Known for its picturesque beauty, this small village pond in the middle of Japan is neither named nor marked on a map.
Metro Art Portrait Series: More People Than You Know is designed to feature and engage the different neighborhoods surrounding the stations of the Metro system. This rotating exhibition features portraits of patrons created by artists connected to the neighborhoods served by the A Line (Blue).
In 1996 and 1997, Metro Art initiated and developed bookmark projects in a creative effort to encourage transit customers to use the Metro system to travel to local libraries. Visual artists and poets were invited to form teams and submit collaborative designs of text and imagery for bookmarks to be distributed in “take one” holders on board 2,000 Metro buses, and at public libraries countywide.
This temporary construction fence, which consisted of 30 painted plywood panel murals, was erected around the drained lake in MacArthur Park in an effort to mitigate construction of MacArthur Park Station.
Project Description The layered cyan, magenta and yellow transparencies in Matthew Brandt’s photographic series L.A. Flow (2016) were processed through a waterfall system that pumps Los Angeles tap water over the surface of each monochrome print. It took weeks for the water to erode the pathways that form the images. Alluding to the necessity of interdependence, the artworks are a reminder that the city’s municipal water system, like Metro, connects us all through an infinitely shifting network of relations that are essential to everyday life. These artworks are part of the Metro Art Photo Lightbox Series and will be displayed in select stations between 2017 and 2020. Artist Statement “Recent events throughout the United States have shown us the fragility of municipal water systems and the power of civic stewardship. Though the populace of Los Angeles is economically and culturally diverse, we all drink from the same tap. Our daily decisions impact those around us.” About the Artist MATTHEW BRANDT (b. 1982, Los Angeles) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of …
Project Description The daytime images were taken directly into the sun, and depict highways as meandering rivers. The nighttime shots move from representation to abstraction becoming a reversed celestial sky. Artist Statement “I couldn’t resist the concept of placing work made about LA itself a couple of years ago in the entrances to its underground circulatory system. This series is comprised of three key daytime aerial images of Los Angeles and four night aerial shots alternating through the seven photo lightbox sequence.” About the Artist MICHAEL LIGHT is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker focused on contemporary American culture’s relationship to the environment. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Library, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He is the recipient of the Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography. Display year: 2010 – 2013 Locations: Vermont/Beverly StationNo longer on display
Featuring the original artworks by twelve artists who created posters for the Through The Eyes of Artists series, Each artwork on display in this passageway focuses on a particular neighborhood or city in Los Angeles County to capture the look and feel of each place from a personal perspective.
Project Description Beautiful photo images depict piles of the not so beautiful remains of mass consumption, serving as visual reminders of the roles we all play in America’s unsustainable culture. Artist Statement “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.” About the Artist CHRIS JORDAN has exhibited his work internationally and is the recipient of the Greenleaf Award and a Lannan Foundation Production Grant. Based in San Francisco, Jordan’s focus on sustainability and waste not only have afforded him exhibition opportunities but also speaking engagements at Green symposiums and conferences. Display year: 2010 – 2013 Locations: 7th St/Metro Center Station No longer on display
Project Description LaBelle’s photographs depict some of LA’s most iconic apartment hotels located in Hollywood, Koreatown and MacArthur Park neighborhoods. These mystifying images draw awareness to important aspects of LA’s past that may have been forgotten. The long exposures give the neon a smoldering luminosity, while the palm trees, illuminated with a hand held spotlight serve as a silent witness to the buildings and their history. Artist Statement “My aim in making these images was to call attention to places in the city that are often overlooked and to illuminate aspects of the city’s history which have been forgotten. Literally casting a light on the past, my hope is that these images will renew the enchantment of the city for those of us who have come to take its beauty and strangeness for granted.” About the Artist CHARLES LABELLE obtained his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and Europe. He was a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center Study Fellowship in …
Project Description In 2001, artist Eileen Cowin inaugurated the program with a series of photographs titled, I see what you’re saying (train of thought). These black and white, larger than life, close-up images of eyes and mouths felt separated from their overall context of a continuing narrative. “Eyes” view, witness, notice, watch and spy while “mouths” talk, pout, utter, and express. In viewing these photographs, we were reminded of our habit of looking at others and reading stories into what we see. As we wait, travel, stand or sit, we daydream and those around us weave into our imagination. Artist Statement “The ‘gestures’ in these images are plainly seen, but remain ambiguous… These scenes ride the edge between the real and the unreal, between social commentary and personal fantasy.” About the Artist EILEEN COWIN is an artist who uses photography as a medium. She has been the chair of the Photography Department at California State University at Fullerton for many years. Her Bachelor of Science is from the State University of New York, New Paltz, and Master …
Project Description Inspired by the disappearing building landmarks of his childhood, the artist used the bygone medium of Polaroid film to make architectural portraits of a certain category of Los Angeles celebrities. Artist Statement “Many of these buildings have appeared in more films than the biggest movie stars. I wanted to make for my daughter pictures of the Los Angeles I remembered growing up. The pictures also hold memories of my mother, what she saw as a young girl with big dreams stepping off that train in Union Station in 1941, from a small town in Minnesota. A mythical city of glamour and Raymond Chandler, the trumpet of Chet Baker, the mood, the light and darkness of Los Angeles.” About the Artist JIM McHUGH has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at New York’s Farmani Gallery, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the James Corcoran Gallery and Timothy Yarger Fine Art in Los Angeles. His photography has garnered many awards and is included in prominent collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, …
For this artwork, Michele Asselin has created luminous portraits of an urban planner, mechanic, bus operator, rail security officer and other professions. The artist found inspiration in the personal and professional stories that drew her subjects to Metro.
Abstract art utilizes a visual language of shape, color, and line to depict a composition devoid of recognizable things from nature.
To mark the historic opening of the first phase of the Expo Line, now E Line (Expo), and to welcome new transit riders to the neighborhood, Metro celebrated the many contributions of the South Los Angeles community and its rich ethnic diversity in a series of light pole banners installed along Crenshaw Blvd. between Exposition and Vernon.
Project Description Travelers, encountered by the artist at Union Station, are captured in hyper real lighting and transformed into everyday icons in a celebration of mundane moments that would otherwise be overlooked. Artist Statement “I’m interested in exploring the character of historically significant sites by shooting a series of environmental portraits of the people who live and work in those locales. Union Station is the beating heart of the vast urban physiology of Los Angeles and its commuters and travelers are a microcosm of the surrounding city and county.” About the Artist SAM COMEN is a documentary photographer and has received Forward Thinking Museum and Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Launch grants and a Communication Arts Photography Annual Award. He has exhibited his work nationally in solo and group shows. Display year: 2014 – 2015 Locations: No longer on display
Photo based artworks by three artists invite visitors to Union Station to explore the histories, paradoxes, ironies and majesties of Los Angeles landscapes.
Deep Connections, an exhibition now on display in the Union Station Passageway Art Gallery, features the otherworldly black and white photography of artist Ken Karagozian.
The seven images selected for this series of cinematically constructed photographs convey both the naturalness and self-consciousness that pervade all adolescent interactions.
Portraits of a cross-section of Angelenos were photographed in front of a pair of paper mache wings, constructed by artist Colette Miller and affixed to a roll down gate on Main Street.
Project Description Coming and Going symbolizes contemporary society’s relationship with nature, which has become that which exists between human-made elements; columns, buildings, roads, and cities. How do we recognize the disjunction in the artist’s image? How do we reassemble them as we see it? Artist Statement “I wanted to juxtapose high resolution photographed imagery of nature with the long traversed underground corridor. The work comes out of my on-going focus of nature and contemporary urban society” About the Artist STEPHEN GALLOWAY has exhibited his photography extensively throughout the west coast and has been published in Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. Galloway received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in Photography from San Francisco State University. Display year: 2009 – 2010 Locations: No longer on display
A multimedia project around migrant LGBTQ+ tribute artists who embody and perform as iconic divas in the Latinx community such as Jenni Rivera, Juan Gabriel, Celia Cruz, Chalino Sanchez, Selena and Paquita la del Barrio.
For Little Tokyo/Arts District Station, Hirokazu Kosaka created six smooth granite benches with concentric circles of black and white, simulating a Zen archery target with station canopies in the shape of Japanese archery bows. Buffer Zone was displayed at the station from 2009-2017 in coordination with the artist.
During a train ride from Oakland to New York, the artist utilized the time to create artistic installations that reinterpreted the interior space of a sleeper car, as well as the relationship between the train and the passing landscape.
