New York, Jan 19. Starting this Thursday, murals with designs of green leaves among which faces of different races peek out remind travelers from the busy Penn Station station in downtown New York that they don’t have to go far to enjoy nature. .
The large-scale works, signed by the African-American multimedia artist Derrick Adams, cover the columns and walls of the two large station concourses with colorful vinyls under the slogan “The city is my refuge”, a reminder of the “duality” that offers the dense city.
“New York has always been known as the concrete jungle, but (I wanted to) talk about the other side of New York, where there are a lot of green spaces that people don’t really look for. Sometimes people leave the city for rural places, and there are many here,” Adams explained to EFE.
The Big Apple has numerous parks just a subway ride away or a bike ride away that don’t require “admission money” and where you can go eat or meet friends, recalls the artist, who is from Baltimore and has been years he commutes by train to work in his studio in Brooklyn.
Adams says he seeks to “create a visual experience” for travelers so that they “take away something unexpected” when interacting with art, whether it’s looking at it, touching it or sitting next to it, as opposed to the more static experience it offers. at a nearby gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood.
At the FLAG Art Foundation, the artist opened a solo exhibition a week ago called “It’s easier for me to show you than to explain it to you” with almost twenty large paintings that freeze representative moments for the black community portrayed with a style Cubist.
The curator, Debra Simon, who invited Adams to exhibit his murals as part of the Art at Amtrak project, stressed that the works, which will be on display until July, “soften the space and bring nature inside” of this important center in the local transport network. EFE
if/fjo/bdp
