Metro Art Announces Monumental Artworks in Three New Downtown Los Angeles Stations

All artworks will be available for viewing upon the stations’ opening on Friday, 6/16/2023.

Artists (left to right, top to bottom): Andrea Bowers, Audrey Chan, Ralph Gibert, Mark Steven Greenfield, Ann Hamilton, Pearl C. Hsiung, Clare Rojas, Mungo Thomson, Clarence Williams and Samira Yamin

Metro Art reveals new site-responsive artworks by eight acclaimed artists, which have been integrated into each level of three highly anticipated downtown Los Angeles Metro Rail stations.

Artworks by

• Clare Rojas and Audrey Chan at Little Tokyo/Arts District Station

• Andrea Bowers, Mark Steven Greenfield and Clarence Williams at Historic Broadway Station

• Ann Hamilton, Pearl C. Hsiung and Mungo Thomson at Grand Ave Arts/Bunker Hill Station

All artists were selected through an open, competitive selection process following the recommendation of a panel of community-based arts professionals. Over 180 local artists, arts and cultural organizations and community advisors were involved in shaping the Metro Art program for these three new stations.

Additionally, temporary exhibitions by Ralph Gilbert and Samira Yamin are on view at the Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill and Historic Broadway Stations as part of the Metro Art Lightbox Exhibition Program.

> Learn more about the new stations and details for opening day!
> Learn more about the artwork and artists.

High Prismatic by Pearl C. Hsiung - Concourse

High Prismatic by Pearl C. Hsiung on the Concourse level at Grand Av Arts / Bunker Hill Station

This ‘geyser’ reflects the dramatic forces of endless change that bubble and erupt in nature and human nature, both of which have shaped the Bunker Hill area. The saturated palette, variegated painting techniques and compositional approach in the artwork reflect aspects of the artist’s Taiwanese American identity and the multi-textured, polychromatic experience of growing up and living in Southern California.

Learn more about the artist and artwork.

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New video: preview the artwork at future Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Station

Regional Connector Corridor Artwork: Time-Lapse of Mural by Pearl C. Hsiung

Piecing together parts of a large-scale glass mosaic mural in preparation for the future Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Station. Created by Pearl C. Hsiung, “High Prismatic” will tower 61 feet high over the station’s prominent concourse elevator lobby.

Translated into glass from an original painting that explodes with clouds of Sumi ink, an eruption of squeegeed enamel paint, rich washes of watercolor and a spray paint speckled sky, the artwork references the constant geological, social and urban change that Bunker Hill has undergone.

Regional Connector is a 1.9-mile light rail project connecting the Metro L Line (Gold) to 7th Street/Metro Center Station in downtown Los Angeles. The project will feature artwork integrated into three new stations: Little Tokyo/Arts District Station, Historic Broadway Station, and Grand Ave Arts/Bunker Hill Station.

Video originally posted on Metro Art

Over the last year, the painting’s glistening colors and textures have been carefully translated into glass mosaic by skilled artisans at Mosaicos Venecianos de Mexico in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The studio works with professional artists to create artworks for public environments.   

The artwork references the constant geological, social and urban change that Bunker Hill has undergone, as well as the artist’s Taiwanese-American identity and “polychromatic” experience of growing up in L.A. 

“I wanted to celebrate the disparate yet harmonious cosmos of images, languages, cultures and relationships that make up the history of this region, its ever churning present and endlessly shifting future,” states Hsiung. 

Mosaic as an art form has been traced back as far as the fourth millennium B.C. to the Temple of Urukin Mesopotamia and the ancient Greek city of Pella. Mosaics were also found in Pre-Columbian cultures, which decorated objects using shells, mother-of-pearl and semi-precious stones. Because glass mosaic is highly durable, materials are often used in artworks in transit systems.

Over 1 million hand-made and cut-glass pieces of various sizes create the final artwork seen here at Mosaicos Venecianos de Mexico during fabrication.

A key step in advance of final assembly and installation is the dry-fit process. Staff from Metro Art & Design recently laid out the fabricated glass mosaic for review with the artist. The goal of the processes is to confirm the artwork fulfills the original artwork design and that all pieces are present before final installation in the station.  

Here’s a quick glimpse into the dry-fit – and more to come!

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Metro Art staff carefully laying out one of over 750 sheets of glass mosaic during dry-fit.

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The back of one glass mosaic sheet among the hundreds assembled during dry-fit at Metro’s Central Maintenance Facility.

Originally posted on Metro Art

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FAULT ZONE at Visitor Welcome Center

Visitor Welcome Center presents
Pearl C. Hsiung and Arshia Haq
Opening Reception on Saturday, November 16, 2019 from 5–8pm
November 16 – December 21, 2019
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12–6 pm

Gomukh is the terminus of the Gangotri glacier whose ice melt is the source of the Bhagirathi River, one of the major headstreams of the Ganges River that flows through India and Bangladesh. In 2017, an Indian court granted Himalayan glaciers the status of environmental personhood, a conservation strategy that legally designates environmental entities the status of a person with rights enforceable by law. The concept emerged as a way to protect and preserve nature, and has been used as a vehicle for courts to legally recognize the relationships indigenous people have to their lands. New Zealand’s Maori have known the Whanganui River to be their ancestor and have been fighting for its protection since the late 1800s. A few weeks before Gomukh was granted legal personhood, a New Zealand court finally determined the Whanganui as a “living entity.” Ascribing human status to nature reveals and muddies the distinction between human and non-human and highlights the range that anthropocentric logic reaches in order to sustain an anthropo-friendly ecology.

The interdependence of human and nature have always been central to Pearl C. Hsiung’s painting, installation and video work. More recently, attention to the artificial has become forefronted in Hsiung’s meditation on human/nature interconnectedness to expand her focus into ideas surrounding a nature/human/artificial interface. The works in Fault Zone take into account the inescapability of the artificial as woven into earthly matter; into the air, water, earth as well as into the flesh of human and the more-than-human. Two paintings, They (Gomukh) and They (Taranaki Falls) depict liquid landscapes in their active and morphing natural and personhood states. Flattening, or obfuscation of dimension, is both a conceptual and formal feature in Hsiung’s works. Various planes, plates, and concepts collapse onto the painted surface, obscuring the lines between human, nature, and artifice.

Emerging from the gallery floor stands Themses, a sited painting comprised of a series of vertical panels that allude to a topography-in-metamorphosis. Blocks of cool-toned paint, with the likeness of dense ice, are pulled downward and dragged across the surface; at times in excess, merging into oozey, marbling streams, while at other times in paucity, exposing the hot, bright fluorescent underpainting. The symmetrical painted panels frame a central ‘ice core’; a plexiglass stripe lined with plastic-film rubbish collected from non-recyclable and under-recycled food and product packaging. By merging anthropological, glacial, and polyethylene temporalities, Hsiung’s work is a proposition of what our lived present looks like. Fault Zone ponders the state of our current ecology that is currently shifting beneath our feet. This movement can occur slowly, in the form of creep, or occur rapidly, as in a quake. Hsiung’s interest is in the extensiveness of this boundaryless space.

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