New York’s MTA Arts & Design Commissions Works from Ivan Forde, Trevor Paglen, and Howardena Pindell

MTA Arts & Design, the art-focused organization that facilitates the creation of artworks for New York’s mass transit system, has revealed the latest three artists to receive commissions: Ivan Forde, Trevor Paglen, and Howardena Pindell.

Forde will create a large-scale mosaic installation for the Broadway Junction subway station. A release describes the artwork, titled Bedtime Story for Brownsville: The Fish Who Carried the Moon (2026), as “a mythic bedtime story in which flying fish carry the Moon from the ocean floor to the sky.” It will be partially set in the entrance to the L train and a pedestrian bridge that extends above Van Sinderen Avenue. Forde said he hopes the work “brings joy, bravery, and pride to young families in Brownsville and its sister neighborhoods, intergenerational community members, local and international travelers alike.”

Paglen’s commission will appear in a pedestrian overpass and a new parking garage at the Southeast stop of the Metro-North train system. Titled Perennial (2026), it will see the artist photograph flora near the station, then run those images through an algorithm that will analyze the flowers’ colors. The end result will look like an abstracted spectrum. Paglen said the work is meant to “reflect on the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine perception.”

Pindell’s commission also has its roots in pictures of flowers and is being produced for the Metro-North’s Botanical Garden station. Her glass installation is based on photos she took at the New York Botanical Garden last summer; she then edited the pictures and ported the results over to glass. The results occasionally veer into abstraction. Pindell said the work “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.”

“These artists are among the most compelling voices in contemporary art today,” said Tina Vaz, director of MTA Arts & Design, said in a statement. “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.”