NEW YORK, NY.- MTA Arts & Design announces a dynamic new mosaic artwork commission by artist Glendalys Medina for the Grand Street station in Brooklyn. Two panels, one on each platform mezzanine, comprise Gratitudes off Grand. The installation totals around 340 square feet of glass mosaic fabricated and installed by Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, including a 40- foot-wide panel on the Brooklyn-bound side. The Grand Street station is receiving ADA accessibility upgrades, including new elevators, completed this month, and other improvements.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Medina began a practice of taking 15-minute walks to get outside and cultivate gratitude. Upon returning to the studio, the artist documented colors that were observed to create a series of studies. The resulting works extend the artist’s practice inspired by Taíno culture, Hip-hop and Latinx culture and music, and humans’ capacity to create sense out of the world, such as the way brains organize patterns. For the Grand Street station project, the artist walked several blocks in each of the cardinal directions in the neighborhood to make site-specific observations in developing the artwork.
“Glendalys Medina’s project reminds us to look closely and experience the beauty and unique characteristics of East Williamsburg and Bushwick,” says Sandra Bloodworth, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “These wonderful abstract and colorful mosaics give our riders a journey that is grounded in the community. As they venture out into the neighborhood, they will experience a palette of colors that are forever celebrated in their station.”
Gratitudes off Grand is comprised of vividly colored geometric forms–circles, diamonds, squares, rectangles–that rhythmically move up and down on a dark field, evoking moving wheels or the natural cycle of emotional states. The interior color fields are inspired by the cultures, landscapes, and environments and inhabitants of Williamsburg. On the Brooklyn-bound side, the color fields are inspired by the national flags of the residents of East Williamsburg and Bushwick, from the area’s first inhabitants, the Lenape, to the Pan-African, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican and Dominican Republic immigrants that followed over time. The colors on the Manhattan-bound panel are derived from the artist’s experience of the neighborhood across seasons, drawn from observations such as a nearby church, birds in the springtime, the Moore Street Market, or the collar of a passing dog. “This artwork is an act of gratitude to those who built and transformed this neighborhood throughout history,” says artist Glendalys Medina. “It has been an honor to create something lasting that I hope will resonate with those to come.”
The compositions of interlocking forms call to mind map details, schematic design drawings, and complex patterns to be decoded. Significantly, the overlapping of shapes allows the eye to complete forms that are disrupted, inviting viewers to look a little longer and contemplate gratitude.
Glendalys Medina is an Afro-Caribbean Nuyorican conceptual interdisciplinary visual artist who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx. Medina received an MFA from Hunter College and has presented artwork at such notable venues as Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and The Studio Museum in Harlem among others. Medina was a recipient of a Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant, a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellowship, an Ace Hotel New York City Artist Residency, an SIP fellowship at EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art, a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES artist residency at El Museo Del Barrio, residencies at Yaddo, and the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency. Medina is currently a professor at SVA’s MFA Art Practice program.
