Art at Amtrak

Art at Amtrak, the official public art program of Amtrak, presents diverse, unique and memorable art projects to enhance, invigorate and humanize the travel experience at Amtrak stations. The art program reflects and celebrates each region's creative preeminence by featuring contemporary artists through rotating exhibitions.

The program launched at New York Penn Station in June 2022, has expanded to Moynihan Train Hall in Summer 2023, to Washington Union Station and William H. Gray III 30th Street Station in Fall 2023.

Art at Amtrak is curated and produced by Debra Simon Art Consulting.

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.

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/
 

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

MARISA MORÁN JAHN

Re/Connections, 2023
Digital print on mesh fabric

Block 675 Fence, 30th Street, NYC

Located along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, adjacent to the Hudson River, and on former marshland, Re/Connections by artist Marisa Morán Jahn is a series of large-scale digital prints on mesh fabric that reflect on our interdependent relationship with water. 

Re/Connections draws influence from Meso-American and Chinese papercut art forms where the punctures are said to let the past through. For Jahn, who is of Chinese and Ecuadorian descent, the holes within the work and the mesh surface serve as portals or passages connecting both times and places. In Re/Connections, the artist meditates on the site’s former history as a key trading route and source of sustenance for animals and humans. By placing the artwork around the staging area where Amtrak and the Gateway Development Commission will build a new rail tunnel linking New York and New Jersey, Re/Connections invites meditation on the transformative role of transportation and trade routes that still exist today. “Our stewardship of public resources like water, railways and civic space are critical to how communities thrive and strengthen resilience,” says Jahn.

Marisa Morán Jahn’s works redistribute power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Jahn, who explores “civic spaces and the radical art of play” (Chicago Tribune), codesigns small to urban-scale projects with immigrant families, domestic workers and public housing residents. Jahn’s work has engaged millions via the United Nations, Tribeca Film Festival, Obama’s White House, Venice Biennale of Architecture and through media coverage in the BBC, CNN, PBS Newshour, The New York Times, Univision Global and more. She is a Sundance and Creative Capital grantee, a Senior Researcher at MIT (her alma mater), an artist in residence at The National Public Housing Museum and the Director of Integrated Design at Parsons/The New School. With Rafi Segal, Jahn co-authored a book, Design & Solidarity (Columbia University Press, 2023), and co-founded Carehaus, the U.S.’s first care-based co-housing project. She is represented by Sapar Contemporary.

Follow the artist on Instagram @marisa_jahn and visit her website at marisajahn.com.

Special Thank You To

Marisa Morán Jahn / Studio REV- 

Micah Campbell Smith, Community Developer 

Ananya Mishra, Studio Assistant

ADAM CRAWFORD

EUPHONIC & CHROMATIC DRIFT, 2023
Digital print on clear vinyl adhesive film

William H. Gray III 30th Street Station, Main Concourse

Adam Crawford’s practice is grounded in his desire to create visually engaging and stylistically unique artwork that appeals to a diverse audience. When developing the Art at Amtrak commission, Crawford focused on the strong lines of the existing architecture, the verticality and height of the space and the spatial symmetry of the main concourse. He also considered the relationship between motion and sound and how both are amplified in a major transit hub, ultimately impacting its overall energy.

The resulting work, Euphonic and Chromatic Drift, is a clear vinyl mural on the window facades at the East and West ends of the station that employs pattern, rounded edges, and color as a response to the linear composition of the architecture. Crawford used the existing gridwork design as the base and sketched forms and pathways that extend from and within the lines of each window frame and column. His resonating shapes and saturated color communicate movement and energy through and around the frames, echoing the collective flow of those who pass through the station on any given day.

Adam Crawford has lived and worked in Philadelphia for 29 years. He has degrees from both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. Crawford is particularly drawn to both interior and exterior large-scale commissions and has several public-facing murals scattered throughout Philadelphia.

Follow the artist on Instagram @acrawfordart and visit his website at adamcrawfordart.com.

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.