NEW YORK, NY.- MTA Arts & Design announces the installation of a new permanent mosaic artwork at the newly constructed Yaphank-BNL Station on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) Greenport Branch. Created by artist Karen Arm, Initium (beginning), greets riders in the station plaza with a radiant depiction of a globular cluster — evoking the mystery of deep space and the processes of formation, transformation, and energy that shape the natural world.
The station’s new location puts it closer to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), a world-renowned research center for physics, energy science, and the fundamental nature of matter. Initium (beginning) was conceived as an artistic counterpart to that scientific work. Where BNL scientists investigate the universe at the scale of particles and phenomena invisible to the human eye, Arm’s mosaic brings the vast and celestial down to human scale — making the invisible, in its own way, visible.
“Every work in our collection is shaped by where it lives,” said Tina Vaz, Director, MTA Arts & Design. “Initium (beginning) is a perfect example — Karen Arm responded to this specific site, this proximity to Brookhaven, and this community of people asking some of the biggest questions humankind knows how to ask. That dialogue between art and place is what MTA Arts & Design is here to create.”
“My mosaic Initium (beginning) is influenced, in part, by the study of nanoparticles at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This research has allowed us to see the smallest underlying substances ever observed. I’m also inspired by the natural world around me on Shelter Island, where daily encounters with its beauty have led me to study the natural sciences and translate those physical realities into my paintings. Through all of my work, I’m searching to depict what feels essential, elemental, and universal,” said artist Karen Arm.
Fabricated by Miotto Mosaic Art Studios, Initium (beginning) features specialty-blown round and rectangular tesserae that mirror the dense clusters and radiant bursts of Arm‘s paintings. The surface shimmers with depth and motion, inviting passengers — whether arriving or departing — to pause and contemplate cycles of beginning and becoming.
Arm approached the mosaic as a study of emergence — how light, form, and energy gather and unfold across space. Rather than depicting a single astronomical event, she created a field of shifting radiance that reflects the processes of formation and transformation that shape the universe. Installed just steps from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Initium (beginning) reflects the common ground between artistic imagination and scientific inquiry: both seek to illuminate what is vast, complex, and often invisible, bringing the origins and behavior of natural forces into human view.
Known for her meditative paintings, Karen Arm (b. 1962) engages in a dialogue between micro and macro; mark and object; and structure and line. Arm meticulously layers and glazes her surfaces, creating vast accumulations of spontaneous marks. Referring to nature as a catalyst for the unknowable, Arm balances the earthly and astral in her paintings to reveal portals to the sublime. Arm lives and works in Shelter Island, NY. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 1985 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1989. She has had six solo exhibitions with P·P·O·W since 1999. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Loong Mah, New York, NY; VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY; Foley Gallery, New York, NY; 56 Henry, New York, NY; Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; among others. In 2002, Arm received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Painting. From 2012 to 2016, Arm’s works were exhibited in the United States Embassy in Burma as part of the Art in Embassies Program. Her seventh exhibition with P·P·O·W, Night Birds, was on view in Summer 2025.
