Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Most New Yorkers couldn’t live without the subway. It is their savior if occasionally their oppressor. They love it so much that they hate it when it lets them down, but the opprobrium is often oddly affectionate. Barroom arguments have fulminated and flourished over which subway line is worse – the F or the 7, the 2 or the L. Patronizing the subway can be a point of gritty cosmopolitan pride: real New Yorkers don’t use Uber. And it’s a great social equalizer, as reflected in Ralph Fasanella’s 1950 folk-art painting Subway Riders, ensconced in the wall of 53rd Street/Fifth Avenue Station and as idealistic as ever. “Subway Riders” the group show is now up at Springs Projects. It keenly captures the subway’s pervasive, multivalent thrum through New York life with work by over 100 artists and a few eager amateurs (one is me). Curator, painter, and gallery co-founder Tommy White tasked them to render their work on the same surface: a New York City Subway Map. This proved a fertile concept for already-fertile minds. Though anchored to a single object with highly specific content, the work ranges far and wide in focus, style, and affect.
Sometimes the maps are subordinated to an oblique but still connected aesthetic priority. Matthew Miller, for instance, overlays his with the drawn image of a monolithic, vaguely brutalist structure, visually decisive yet with a mythic vibe and a rich ambivalence, like the subway itself. Other artists take a wry, data-driven approach; see Nancy Bowen’s coyly pedagogical rearrangement of the map’s stops in alphabetical and numerical order. There is cheerfully sardonic Pop Art, like Steve Ellis’s energizing drawing 5-Star City. For some, including Sharon Butler, Patricia Fabricant, and Glenn Goldberg – whose urban-pastoral Bronx River murals enliven East 149th Street Station in The Bronx – the maps service geographically accented visual biographies. A number of pieces are deconstructively abstract (Thomas Ray Willis), resolutely reductive (Esperanza Mayobre), or discreetly socio-political (Naomi Fry), invariably issued with a smart angle and an elegant aesthetic concept. There is plenty of room for pointed juxtaposition – check out Mary Temple’s hovering sunrise over Prospect Park Lake and B. Wurtz’s graphic distribution of commercial produce among the five boroughs – as well as fond elegy. Susan Homer’s handsome owl regally haunts a befogged city over Central Park, doubtless referencing Flaco, the owl who escaped the zoo, charmed the city, and collided fatally with a building on February 25, 2024, immortalized by Fred Tomaselli in the collage titled with that date and, alongside other birds, in his mosaic suite Wild Things gracing 14th Street Station.
The underground trains chug through the cinema of the city, especially from the 1970s – paradoxically, the nadir of the subway’s operational integrity and the apex of its symbolic power. In The French Connection, it’s on the subway that “Frog 1” escapes Popeye Doyle and “Frog 2” dies at his hand. The subway is the exclusive site of one of film’s great unsung neo-noir urban morality tales, The Incident, and one of its most celebrated and inventive thrillers, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Much later, in Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, lost during Hurricane Sandy, survives it on, yeah, the subway. The list goes on. While this formidable array isn’t peppered with cinematic allusions, DB Berkeman’s topical storyboard cued to key locales in Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese’s 1976 descent into an epochally scabrous New York that cast the subway system as a metaphor for American decay and dissolution and a trigger for psychosis – delivers authoritative narrative punch as well as cleverly deflective promotion: the prospect of encountering Travis Bickle at the helm of a hailed hack would make anyone want to take the subway.
“Subway Riders,” Springs Projects, 20 Jay Street, Suite 311B, Brooklyn, NY. Through November 22, 2025.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
