NEW YORK, NY.- At 700,000 square feet, Grand Central Madison, the new Long Island Rail Road terminal opening in December, has an impressive scale: It is costing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority more than $11 billion, and the project, its largest ever, has been underway since 2006. Once known as East Side Access, the terminal was carved out of Manhattan bedrock and stretches underneath Madison Avenue from East 43rd to East 48th streets.

MTA Arts & Design, which commissions art for the transit authority, has announced that the terminal will also be an underground gallery of sorts featuring enormous mosaics by two women with strong New York City connections: Kiki Smith, a longtime resident known for her figurative work, and Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese sculptor and installation artist who lived in the city from 1958 to 1975.

“It had to be top-tier artists,” Janno Lieber, MTA chair and CEO, said in an interview. “The art has to match the caliber of the aspirations and stature of the facility.”

Smith and Kusama were chosen by a committee of arts professionals and transit authority staff members in 2020, after an open call for portfolios.

Sandra Bloodworth, director of MTA Arts & Design, said that the installation would turn the underground terminal into a “cultural corridor.”

“The project is about connecting people to the city in a new way, and the artwork will connect you in a different, more ephemeral way,” Bloodworth added.

Both artists will be making floor-to-ceiling mosaics, covering 2,400 square feet total, with one of them stretching 100 feet long.

“I love that,” Lieber said of the medium. “Mosaics are such a New York City vocabulary for art in the public space, especially in the subways.”

In a statement, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said that the new terminal is a transformative change for the Long Island Rail Road and “will serve as a symbol of New York’s world renowned arts and culture scene.”

The designs are still under wraps, but Smith said in a statement that her piece would “bring the beauty of the eastern shores of Long Island and the East River light to life.”

“I created this work with the goal of giving people a beautiful image to carry with them and to provide a sense of place in the station,” she said.

Smith, 68, was raised in New Jersey — her father, Tony Smith, was a noted sculptor — and moved to New York in 1976, only one year after Kusama left. Smith made her name with large-scale bronzes of the female figure and more recently turned to inspiration from flora and fauna.

As for Kusama, now 93 and living in Tokyo, in her New York years she began making some of the artworks that have brought her fame, including her “Infinity Net” paintings and “Infinity Room” installations. She has had a local presence more recently, too, at the 2021 New York Botanical Garden show, “Kusama: Cosmic Nature.”

The Grand Central Madison artworks are the latest from the MTA Arts & Design program. Nick Cave created a three-part work, in both mosaic and video, for the tunnel connecting Times Square and Grand Central Station, part of which debuted in 2021; it was completed in the spring. When the long-awaited Second Avenue subway opened in 2017, it unveiled works by Sarah Sze, Chuck Close, Vik Muniz and Jean Shin.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.