[title]
Whether or not New Yorkers think about it when rushing through Penn Station, a train station serves as a liminal space—an in-between place somewhere between where we’ve been and where we’re going. The latest Art at Amtrak exhibit explores that transcendence with a vibrant, multicolor installation that fills the station’s rotunda.
Titled "Get Carried Away, You Have the Right," the artwork by David Rios Ferreira will be on view alongside artist Shoshanna Weinberger's "Traveling Along Horizons" until January 2024. Here's a first look at these powerful creations and the stories behind them.
RECOMMENDED: The best museum exhibitions in NYC right now
Turning Penn Station into a cosmic gateway
Neon pink, green and yellow designs cover the pillars of the Penn Station rotunda, interspersed with sketches of maps and trains from the Amtrak archives. The artwork draws from influences as vast as 18th-century etchings and contemporary comic books.
“I thought, ‘what if we turn this rotunda into a teleport where you can be inspired to teleport yourself to anywhere you need to go to, anywhere you need to be,’” Ferreira tells Time Out New York.
Each pillar represents a temporal being to provide guidance, with a depiction of a celestial gateway above the Amtrak waiting area. Cosmic serpents, which are linked to time travel and the spirit world, snake across the soffit of the space.
Ferreira drew both on his love of sci-fi and his heritage as a native New Yorker with Puerto Rican lineage. "To me, this space is a mixture of Indigeneity, Indigenous futurism, Afro-futurism, mestizaje," he said.
Passersby are encouraged to stand in the center of the rotunda and gaze up at the designs around them.
"I believe if you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going," Ferreira said in his artist statement. Everyone carries history in their bodies and brings their own baggage—literally for travelers—along with them, he said.
Exploring how we mark time
Meanwhile, down a corridor in the departure hall, Shoshanna Weinberger’s “Traveling Along Horizons” has emblazoned pillars and walls with a stripe pattern that invites further exploration. In a space where time is of constant importance—What time is it? When does my train board?—Weinberger’s tick marks investigate how civilization measures the time between sunrise and sunset. Some lines are in sets of 24, some in 12 and others in seven.
Her stripes also explore the complexity of the artist's hybrid identity as an Afro-Caribbean-American, signifying societal division according to race, gender, class, and politics. The Newark-based artist was born in Jamaica. She decorated pillars in the space with images of abstract bodies.
"I wanted to incorporate this idea of marginalized bodies,” she tells Time Out. "Having female bodies be the pillars of civilization. I also love the idea of these figures being marginalized but also monumental. ... They are covered in black and white stripes that allude to my skin."
Stripes, she asserts, are associated with animals, flags, borders and bar codes.
About Art at Amtrak
This is the latest installment of the Art at Amtrak program, which launched last summer and will continue to showcase contemporary art from around the region through temporary exhibitions which rotate every few months. The program has turned Penn Station into one of the busiest galleries in NYC—and it's completely free.
As the program's curator, Debra Simon said she's long followed Ferreira's and Weinberger's work. In the rotunda, she's taken by the anime influence, which is rare to see at a large scale in public art. As for the departure hall artwork, Simon's drawn by the symbolism of marking time in a literal waiting room.
"I'm always thinking about the commuters who are here when they're coming into the office or New York but they're here much more than the passersby from one place to the other, so they have more of an opportunity to be in the space observe and think about it," Simon said.
In addition to the Penn Station pieces, Art at Amtrak has expanded across the street to the Moynihan Train Hall screens, which now feature a digital version of Derrick Adams' "The City Is My Refuge: In Motion," which was previously on view in the Penn Station rotunda. Animator Jahmir Duran-Abreu helped bring Adams' work to life in a digital format on LED screens in Moynihan's main concourse.
"It's a testament to the fact that our customers love it, the passengers who take commuter rail love it, and the public loves it," Sharon Tepper, Amtrak director, planning and development for New York Penn Station, said in an interview. "It just continues our commitment to not only station improvement but also engaging with the local community of artists and giving them our station as their canvas to express their creative ideas."