Art in Transit
Maren Hassinger (American, born 1947). Detail of Message from Malcolm, 1998. Mosaic tile, located at New York City Transit Central Park North–110th Street station (2, 3). Metropolitan Transportation Authority. © Maren Hassinger. Photo: Rob Wilson.
For the first time, public, site-specific installations within the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) system are designated as part of an exhibition at The Met. Flight into Egypt, Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual, literary, musical, scientific, scholarly, religious, political, and performative pursuits. Three distinct emblems of Black life, located within a two-mile radius in Harlem, visualize claims to ancient Egypt by artists of the African diaspora.
Illuminated by the fluorescent lights of the underground station and embedded in walls of gridded white tile, Houston Conwill’s The Open Secret (1984/1986) is the first commission by the MTA to be installed in the subway and serves as a memorial to the Harlem community of the 1980s. Similarly approaching this neighborhood as both site and subject, Maren Hassinger’s Message from Malcolm (1998) and Terry Adkins’s Harlem Encore (1999) were unveiled more than a decade later. Celebrations of ancient Egypt unite these three site-specific works, symbolizing the global diasporic resonance of and continued kinship to this undeniably great African culture. While seemingly disparate in style and form, these installations foreground considerations of community and history intrinsic to the neighborhood in which they are located.
