Art at Amtrak - Spring 2024 Artworks

CHITRA GANESH

Coherence, 2024
Digital animations

Moynihan Train Hall, Main Hall Digital Screens
In Partnership with Empire State Development

Across a 20 year practice, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh has developed an expansive body of work rooted in drawing and painting, which has evolved to encompass animations, collages, computer-generated imagery, video and sculpture. Ganesh uses her artwork to reconcile representations of femininity, sexuality and power and to address the human experience. She often draws on Hindu and Buddhist iconography and South Asian art forms, such as Kalighat and Madhubani.

The sequence of movements featured in Coherence is inspired by “coherent breathing,” a meditative and concentrative practice that involves taking long, deep breaths at a slow rate. This type of breath work has roots in ancient cultures and, when paired with simple synchronized motions, aids with aligning the sympathetic nervous system and can be helpful in treating anxiety, depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The practice can also build the capacity and spaciousness of an individual so they can better endure the stresses of everyday life.

Coherence gives visitors to Moynihan Train Hall the opportunity to contemplate, slow down and experience a moment of tranquility as they pass through this highly trafficked public space. Each screen cycles through a different environment with similar movements, echoing how we all operate in a unique mental and physical space but still have parallels. The timing and sequence of images resonate with the rhythmic flow of human bodies on the go and encourage viewers to pause and participate, with their own bodies, in the harmonized motions they see on the screen.

Photo by Art Enables

ART ENABLES

Forward: A Group Exhibition, 2024
Digital print on vinyl adhesive film

Washington Union Station, North Hangar Passageway

Art Enables is an art studio and gallery dedicated to amplifying the creative careers of artists with disabilities. Guided by the belief that artists with disabilities are vital to a robust arts landscape, Art Enables provides a platform for resident artists to develop and exhibit their work, creating space for their unique perspectives while dismantling stereotypes and celebrating inclusion.

Art at Amtrak is proud to showcase the dynamic work of 22 resident artists of Art Enables at Washington Union Station, offering travelers a window into an exciting part of the district’s rich arts community. All artists in this exhibition are mostly self-taught and represent a wide stylistic range. Some wield a clean precision depicting natural landscapes and realistic scenes, while others use abstract figures and shifting shapes to infuse familiar subjects with unexpected energy. Many artists pay close attention to every inch of space, filling what might be depicted as the absence of subject with a profusion of line work.

Here, six groupings of five windows represent this visual diversity, unified by various themes. A continuous horizon spans travel landscapes in the Around the World in Eighty Days set while swooping, colorful lines breeze through Technicolor Wind. Densely packed stripes and patterns buttress human figures in Holding Pattern. In Party Guests and Tide Pool, playful forms bubble, bloom and vibrate together in close quarters. And finally, Born in the Trees shares lush habitat views of birds and flowers in vivid greens and buttery yellows.

Photo by Dolby Chadwick Gallery

KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

Potomac River Shen Series, 2024
Digital print on vinyl adhesive film

Washington Union Station, Passenger Waiting Area

Artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann creates large-scale paintings and paper installations that examine mythology, identity and landscape. With the notion of land tied deeply to the understandings of cultural and national identity, Mann paints abstract realms that situate within, and negotiate between, Chinese and Western canons of landscape picture-making.

For the Potomac River Shen Series, Mann uses flora and fauna such as waterlilies, pond lettuce and clovers to construct images of floating worlds that extend from nature, a reference to the “cloud rafts” often portrayed in Buddhist iconography. These elements are woven together into giant garland-scrolls that spawn from the form of a clam located in the center of each mural. The central clam figures depict the freshwater clams endemic to the Potomac River while the scrolls reference the documentation of historical and mythological narratives that give shape to the past and help inform the future. The clam figures painted by Mann also reference the clam monsters in Chinese folklore, called shen, that create mirages of cities, buildings and entire worlds out of bubbles and ultimately inspired the title of the series.

By alluding to mythical shen and “cloud rafts” through the illustration of creatures and botanicals found in Washington, DC’s beloved local river, this mural celebrates the magic and majesty of the tiniest denizens of our immediate environment.

RICO GATSON

Untitled (Collective Light Transfer), 2024
Digital print on vinyl adhesive film

NY Penn Station Rotunda & Concourse

The diverse artistic practice of NY-based artist Rico Gatson visually articulates, in an abstract way, the layering of ideas and inspirations he has considered throughout his career. These include spirituality, African, Native and Indigenous artistic practice, music as a transcendental force, illumination as a concept, abstract mathematics and the role of art in counterculture movements and political identity.

For Untitled (Collective Light Transfer), Gatson designed geometric compositions that continue to reference these themes. His carefully selected color palette and contrast ratio illuminate the station with pulsating energy, while the pattern-rich imagery evokes a sense of resonating rhythm and vibration. The radiating lines and the concentric circles echo the collective movement of bodies circulating throughout Penn Station.

In totality, the designs in Untitled (Collective Light Transfer) coalesce together to uplift, reflect and guide travelers as they move between the rotunda, the concourse, their train and on to their next destination.

TIN & ED

We Are Made of Time, 2024
Digital animation

Moynihan Train Hall, Main Hall Digital Screens
In Partnership with Empire State Development

Photo by Seth Nicolas

You are in Moynihan Train Hall, where everything moves. Shoes thud, shoulders undulate and engines whir, actions governed by a linear schedule, by time measured down to the minute. Beyond the visible, the bedrock of the hall is made of movement, too. It is built using Tennessee Marble, a limestone that formed from the accumulated shells of marine life forms 460 million years ago.

We Are Made of Time, an ambitious video installation throughout the train hall by Tin & Ed, performs a temporal magic trick, compressing 4.5 billion years of Earth’s geological change into a symphonic moment. Harnessing procedural modeling software, the artists have generated rocks, minerals, 3D sculpted fossils and scanned elements, placing them into a fluid, constantly shifting panoramic landscape—one unmoored from linear time. In it, seemingly solid surfaces—the foundations that we walk above, the carved-out spaces trains speed through—are revealed to be in flux, albeit in ways we can’t usually see. They shift and fuse into one another, exposing a planet that is startlingly alive.

In daily life, time is framed as exclusively linear: everything pushing forward, all at once. We Are Made of Time urges viewers to step outside this structure, to consider how geological events millions of years ago connect to us now and how present happenings will echo into the vast expanse of what’s to come. 

WILIAM KENTRIDGE

We Will Make Shoes from the Sky, 2024
Video Installation

Moynihan Train Hall, Main Hall Digital Screens
In Partnership with Empire State Development

In We Will Make Shoes from the Sky by South African artist William Kentridge, a cast of characters stand facing the grand waiting area of the station confronting the bustle of moving passengers below. The characters in each video are based on real people from various moments in history. Some are people who fled Vichy France towards the end of World War II for Martinique and then on to destinations in North and South America. Other characters presented were pioneers of the Negritude movement, which is a consciousness of pride in the cultural and physical aspects of African heritage. This movement took hold in Paris and was led by the famous Martinique writer, Aimé Césaire, and his wife Suzanne Césaire, a teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Josephine Baker, a friend to many artists and intellectuals in Paris, also makes an appearance as does James Baldwin, an American who left for France to pursue his social activism and freedom of expression.

The portrayed intellectuals, creatives, writers and artists are also the cast of characters for the theatrical production, The Great Yes, The Great No, which Kentridge has developed for the Luma Foundation and will debut in Arles in 2024 in association with the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. For the passengers in Moynihan Train Hall, these characters provide an opportunity to pause and connect to those from the past who embarked on their own journeys to find creative freedom and celebrate individuality.

Jay Bird, Duane Blacksheare-Staton, Mara Clawson, Calvin “Sonny” Clarke, Jacqueline Coleman, Jabari Cooper, Josephine Finnell, Payman Jazini, Charmaine Jones, Toni Lane, Helen Lewis, Keith Lewis, Paul Lewis, Raymond Lewis, CeeJ Maples, Charles Meissner, Gary Murrell, Dennis Quillin, Jamila Rahimi, Eileen Schofield, A.T. and Imani Turner.

Curated by Marissa Long, Art Enables Gallery Director & Curator

Follow Art Enables on Instagram @artenables or visit art-enables.org.

Chitra Ganesh, born in 1975 in Brooklyn, NY, received a BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University. She then attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, NY in 2002.

Ganesh's work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA; The Brooklyn Museum, NY, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Ford Foundation, NY, USA; University of Michigan Museum of Art, MI, USA; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, USA; the Devi Art Foundation, India; Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, India; the Saatchi Collection, London, UK; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Deutsche Bank, amongst others.

Ganesh is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from various organizations including the New York Foundation for the Arts; Printed Matter; the Art Matters Foundation; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; the Pollock Krasner Foundation; and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann examines landscape painting, environment, and cultural estrangement by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations. These combine romantic, utopian and immersive sensibilities from both Chinese and Western landscape painting with a lexicon drawn from a personal mythology informed by Mann’s identity as a biracial, second-generation Asian American. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, and her work has been exhibited at the Kreeger Museum, Academy Art Museum, Walters Art Museum, American University Museum, Tides Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon. Mann is based in Washington, DC, and is represented by Morton Fine Art.

Follow the artist on Instagram @ktzulan and visit her website at https://www.katherinemann.net/.

Rico Gatson is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, identity, pop culture and spirituality through sculpture, painting, video and public art projects. For almost three decades, he has been celebrated for politically layered artworks, often based on significant moments in Black history such as the Watts Riots, the formation of the Black Panthers, the election of President Barack Obama and other related subjects. In 2019, Gatson completed a major commission for MTA Arts & Design titled “Beacons,” which is installed at the 167th Street subway station on the Grand Concourse. The commission consists of eight large-scale mosaic portraits of significant figures connected to the Bronx. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at numerous institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The Contemporary Art Museum at The University of South Florida, FL; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and The Essl Museum, Austria. Gatson is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, NY and NYU and he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Follow the artist on Instagram @rico_gatson and visit this website milesmcenery.com/artists/rico-gatson.

Tin & Ed were avid rock collectors from childhood, searching the earth for precious finds, scouring their surfaces for clues about our world. As adults, they were drawn to formalized arrangements of rocks and minerals: natural history museums and cabinets of curiosities. We Are Made of Time is, in some ways, their imagined rock collection enlarged, one freed from rules of scale or probability. Like a cabinet of curiosity, it layers time scales together—cosmic, geological and biological—showing loops and patterns and connections, at once ancient and beyond our lifetime.

Follow the artists on Instagram @tinanded.

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Often drawing from socio-political conditions in post-apartheid South Africa, Kentridge’s work takes on a form that is expressionist in nature. For Kentridge, the process of recording history is constructed from reconfigured fragments to arrive at a provisional understanding of the past—this act of recording, dismembering and reordering crosses over into an essential activity of the studio. His work spans a diverse range of artistic media such as drawing, performance, film, printmaking, sculpture and painting. Kentridge has also directed a number of acclaimed operas and theatrical productions and is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale and the University of London. Recent major exhibitions of his work have been shown at MFA Houston, Texas (2023); The Broad Museum, Los Angeles (2022); the Royal Academy, London (2022); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019). Kentridge has participated in Documenta (2012, 2002, 1997) as well as the Venice Biennale (2015, 2005, 1999 and 1993).

Follow the artist on Instagram @williamkentridgestudio and visit his website at www.kentridge.studio.

An award-winning public arts curator and producer, Debra Simon has more than 30 years of experience in visual and performing arts programming for civic organizations, the real estate industry, and other companies. While working at the Downtown Alliance, she created the Music at Castle Clinton concert series, Dine Around Downtown, and co-founded the River-to-River Festival in 2002. As the Director of Times Square Arts, Simon oversaw Midnight Moment, the world’s largest digital art exhibition on electronic billboards, and the annual Valentine Heart design competition, among other projects for the over 300,000 daily visitors to Times Square. As Artistic Director at Brookfield Properties, she led a national arts program that planned and executed multi-disciplinary programming, presenting over 500 free events annually in New York, Denver, Los Angeles, and Houston. Collaborations with artists, architects, landscape designers, local arts organizations, and presenting partners have contributed to her expertise in creating and reimagining public spaces. Current clients include Amtrak, Taconic Partners, Hudson Yard Hell’s Kitchen Alliance, Fifth Avenue Association, and Third Street Music School Settlement. For more information, visit Debra Simon Art Consulting. Simon is collaborating with producer Common Ground Arts to realize Art at Amtrak. Visit dsimonartconsulting.com for more information.

See the current installation of Art at Amtrak.