SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- MTA Arts & Design announced three major new commissions by acclaimed artists Ivan Forde, Trevor Paglen, and Howardena Pindell. Each will create a permanent, site-specific art installation for a different MTA station. Forde’s large-scale mosaic installation will be featured at New York City Transit’s Broadway Junction ACJLZ ; Paglen will transform a new pedestrian overpass and adjacent parking-garage facade at Metro-North's Southeast station; and Pindell will create a dynamic glasswork for the overpass and stairwell landings at Metro-North's Botanical Garden station. All three commissions are planned for completion by late 2027.
Ivan Forde’s commission will invite viewers into a vivid, imaginative narrative inspired by the artist’s cyanotypes and watercolors. Drawing on his expansive visual epics, Forde intertwines personal and global histories to create imagery that connects viewers across cultures, geographies, and time. His artwork unfolds as a mythic bedtime story in which flying fish carry the Moon from the ocean floor to the sky, offering riders a moment of creative wonder within the transit environment. The installation will be realized in glass and ceramic mosaic and will be incorporated into three new areas within Broadway Junction ACJLZ currently under construction, including an accessible street-level entrance and pedestrian bridge over Van Sinderen Avenue.
Trevor Paglen's commission, Perennial, extends his longstanding investigation into machine vision and the ways emerging technologies interpret the natural world. For this work, Paglen will photograph native wildflowers near the station and process the images through a computer-vision algorithm that computes each flower’s average color. These data-driven interpretations will become a series of panels—each representing a single flower—rendered in colorful laminates of varying transparencies to form a digital garden that appears to bloom year-round. The artwork will be located in the central elevator lobby of the Metro-North Southeast station’s new parking garage and in a pedestrian overpass.
Howardena Pindell’s commission begins with photographs she captured during a summer visit to the New York Botanical Garden. She later collaged the images into new compositions, which were transformed through a digital half‑toning process into her signature dot motif. Translated into glass, the artwork shifts from a photographic collage at a distance to an abstract constellation of dots up close. Transparent openings woven throughout the design invite riders to engage simultaneously with the artwork and the surrounding station environment. Pindell's glass installation will be located in the overpass and stairwell landings of Metro-North's Botanical Garden station.
“These artists are among the most compelling voices in contemporary art today,” said Tina Vaz, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “By bringing their work into the public realm, we affirm our commitment to making museum‑quality art part of New Yorkers’ daily lives and to transforming transit spaces into environments of beauty, imagination, and cultural resonance.”
“My mission is to create new visual epics that insist on the value of imaginative world building for communities of color in public space,” said artist Ivan Forde. “I hope this cycle of mosaics brings joy, bravery, and pride to young families in Brownsville and its sister neighborhoods, intergenerational community members, local and international travelers alike.”
“Perennial uses computer vision to translate the colors of regional native flowers into a pixelated glass garden at Southeast station, inviting commuters to notice the plant life around them and reflect on the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine perception,” said artist Trevor Paglen.
“When you get off the train, the artwork is an expression of what you’ll see when you arrive. It adds a little joy ahead of getting to the garden, especially if you investigate where each of the images come from—such as the flowers, the squirrels, or the greenhouse,” said artist Howardena Pindell. “It’s very meaningful to me that this piece will be a part of so many memories for people visiting the Botanical Gardens, or just passing through."
Ivan Forde is based in Manhattan, working across painting, printmaking, sound performance, web, and public art. He builds powerful imagery and environments exploring Black heritage, the natural world, and the structures of epic poetry to redefine notions of migration, memory, homeland, and self. Forde recently debuted his first permanent mosaic installed in the elementary commons of Success Academy's Bronx K-12 campus. Forde has exhibited internationally, including a 2023 solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan, and participated in the 2025 British Textile Biennial.
Trevor Paglen’s work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.
Howardena Pindell lives and works in New York City. Her large-scale abstract paintings and mixed-media works combine materials and techniques—at times in unconventional ways—to explore color, structure, and texture. By developing a visual language through the use of circles, numbers, and grids, Pindell’s work reflects her interests and struggles ranging from her observations of the cosmos to systemic prejudice in the United States.
