Art On The Metro, Los Angeles’ Moving Museum

Los Angeles County covers 4,000-square-miles. Ten million people live within its borders. They reside in 88 different cities with 88 different mayors and 88 different city councils. Beverly Hills, Burbank, Inglewood, the city of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Malibu, Pasadena, West Hollywood.

L.A.’s Metro system connects them all through its network of buses, rail, bikeways, the Metro Micro rideshare, and carpool lanes. In addition to moving people literally, Metro aims to move people figuratively through an arts program initiated in the early 1980s, not long after its inception.

The striking results of its latest commissions can be seen at seven new rail stations opened in fall of 2022, three more opened in June of 2023, and on buses across the system. A movable feast for the eyes.

“Oftentimes when people think about moving people, they think of just going from A to B, but for those of us that take transit regularly, there’s a lot more,” Maya Emsden, head of Metro’s art program, told Forbes.com. “There’s waiting at A, and also on board a bus, in Los Angeles County, many people take the bus for a good long part of their day, and so it’s wonderful to be able to offer them artworks along that journey.”

More than 800,000 people ride Metro buses and trains each weekday. A tiny fraction of the system’s roughly $8 billion annual budget goes toward Metro Art, providing those riders with free, public art to make the ride more uplifting.

“We are providing our customers with world class art. They love it and the artists love it. The artists love being able to have their work be seen by folks that maybe wouldn’t be able to see it in a gallery,” Emsden said. “There are definitely more people seeing that work in our system than in all of the museums in L.A. County combined.”

Artists featured run the gamut from established to emerging, but all have a close tie to L.A. For the three most recent Metro Rail installations, an open call for ideas generated 1200 submissions. Fourteen were selected by a committee of L.A. arts professionals assembled by Emsden including curators from the county’s prestigious art museums.

“We don’t give artists a theme,” Emsden explains. “We literally say, ‘Hey, you got commissioned,’ and we give them a good amount of time to really explore that community and that neighborhood and to be very site responsive.”

Each artwork is individual to the station and responds to area it will be seen in.

Audrey Chan’s 14-panel porcelain enamel and steel mural, Will Power Allegory, flanks the tracks on either side of the train platform at the Little Tokyo/Arts District station. The piece–168-feet-long and 14-feet-high–presents different vignettes on each panel populated by real people throughout the decades from city enclaves including Little Tokyo, Skid Row, the former Bronzeville area and the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe.

Pearl C. Hsiung’s monumental High Prismatic in the Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill station’s concourse area features a vertical, hand-cut glass mosaic of an erupting geyser under a full moon stretching 61-feet-high referencing geologic, anthropologic, and cultural change over thousands of years on, specifically, Bunker Hill.

Former Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Clarence Williams’ Migrations can be seen on the platform at the historic Broadway Station. The piece is a black-and-white photo essay transferred to panels of porcelain enamel steel addressing Black migration and migration to Los Angeles.

Installations are permanent and incorporated into the design phase of each station’s construction, a process which can take more than a decade.

“An artist is often commissioned 10 years before the work is actually installed; it’s not like the work is done 10 years ago, they get selected on the basis of their work and then they start to develop their design for the station,” Emsden explains. “It’s a lot of engineering. It’s a lot of safety reviews and materials reviews. It’s a lot of very thoughtful and intentional work, and it’s very integrated into the system. We don’t add (artworks) on later because that would be very costly to have to retrofit it; it’s actually part of the architecture.”

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was in L.A. last October for the new rail line openings.

“He said of all the things that he saw, the way in which Metro has integrated the art and been so community responsive to transform those stations into something that is unique was a model for the country,” Emsden remembers. “We worked hard on that project for over a decade and that was very rewarding to hear.”

Metro will be opening two more rail lines and stations, with new art projects, in the next couple of years. They will run directly to LAX airport.

“Through the Eyes of the Artists”

Recalling the glamorous bygone days of travel, experiences stylishly promoted in posters for French rail lines and TWA, L.A. Metro for two decades has supported a poster art series, “Through the Eyes of the Artists.” Local artists are engaged to respond to the communities and neighborhoods serviced by buses.

Taking advantage of an in-house print shop–someone has to print all those schedules–L.A. Metro’s art posters reside inside its buses.

“It’s nice amidst all the advertisements to stumble upon a little jewel of an artwork by a local artist,” Emsden, who not only leads Metro’s art program, but is also a daily rider, said. “What better way to portray the hundreds and hundreds of communities in L.A. County than through the eyes of local artists and encourage people to go to these places by transit. It was just a perfect marriage.”

The program was instantly more popular than expected. Their first tip-off was the rapidity with which the posters were “disappearing.” Next came the phone calls from riders looking for extras. Collectors popped up.

Metro officials took copies of the posters to Washington, D.C. as gifts when lobbying California and national legislators to support more funding for the system.

“The next year when they went there, guess what, (the posters) were framed and in their offices,” Emsden said.

President Joe Biden was given one on a trip to L.A. in 2022.

As Metro Art’s “Through the Eyes of Artists” poster series celebrates its 20th year, 20 posters from the archives will be on display on buses in the coming months. The 20 artworks are split into four releases–each with five posters. Riders will be able to get copies for free at Customer Service Centers while supplies last. Metro will also continue offering pop-up opportunities to meet the artists and have posters signed.

“It’s a wonderful giveaway, a very efficient and beautiful and intentional way of engaging our customers through the arts,” Emsden said.

Metro Arts’ events page will alert anyone interested to times and locations.

And don’t overlook Metro’s performing arts series at historic Union Station which will feature a concert from Yo-Yo Ma later in 2023.