New York will get a significant art destination when Terminal C opens at La Guardia Airport on Saturday.
The executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said travelers should know where they are.
All of the artists living and working in New York are poised to become new city landmarks.
The new works were commissioned by Delta Air Lines in partnership with the Queens Museum and are part of a $12 million art program in Terminal C.
As the largest carrier in New York, Delta wanted the artwork in its terminal to be New York-centered and reflect the diversity of its company.
Sally Tallant, the Queens Museum's president and executive director, said that each of the six artists chosen by the Delta team from dozens initially presented by the Queens Museum had an opportunity to push their practices in terms of scale and experimentation.
Virginia Overton is known for her sculptures made from recycled materials that respond directly to architectural spaces and she has installed a dozen large and glowing gem shapes crafted from New York City skylights in the arrivals and departures hall.
She said she wanted to make something that was indicative of New York. She remembers her father telling her stories of flying in low over New York on business trips and looking down at buildings with dramatic skylights. In her Brooklyn studio, she often finds herself looking up at the skylights.
Each of her sculptures contains large panes of old-fashioned security glass set into metal that can be up to nine feet long. She replicated the mirror half of the skylights to make jewel-like forms. The skylights from some of the buildings around here will hopefully engage people who have just flown in to New York.
The work of Rashid Johnson summons the collective anxieties of our times. 60 agitated faces loom in rows across a 45 by 15 foot expanse on a wall visible from three levels of the arrivals and departures hall.
Travel is an interesting and complicated and beautiful event, whether you think of it for the purpose of bettering yourself or the refugee crisis right now, said Johnson. It feels like all of us.
Within the repetition of his simplified geometric faces reduced to wide eyes and clenched mouths and pieced together largely from black-and-white ceramic fragments, Johnson has achieved glorious variation.
The gymnastics of the scale definitely pushed me to challenge myself physically as far as my interactions in the work, said Johnson, who moved here from Chicago and lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, N.Y.
For a decade, Ronny Quevedo has rearranged gymnasium flooring to explore sites of convening and sport, which he views as especially important to immigrant communities. For the first time, the artist has made a wooden gym floor from scratch and mounted it on a wall of Delta's arrivals and departures hall. Its brightly painted lines of play are rearranged into an abstract composition.
The urban environment we live in is always moving into new directions, and that's what my father and I did when we lived in the Bronx. The gymnasium flooring is an opportunity for the artist to represent the multiple intersections and communities and different experiences one can get from New York.
The constellations of stars were applied in layers of gold and silver leaf.
A portrait of New York based on a data visualization of the more than 700 languages and dialects spoken in the area was created by the multimedia artist Mariam Ghani.
There are six planetary clusters in the city and the tristate area. These spheres are engraved with the name of a language in its own script and contain a number of smaller circles in a spectrum of vivid colors.
New York is the most linguistically diverse city in the world and every language is a way of seeing the world, according to an Afghan American born in New York. She used data from the last census and the Endangered Language Alliance.
The most difficult part of the project was spelling the languages correctly. You can fix it later.
The artist Fred Wilson often uses black as a means of meaning. He combined starlight globes with black oceans in his La Guardia piece. Due to supply chain issues, 12 globes ranging from 18 inches to 11 feet in diameter will be suspended in a three-story hallway of the arrivals and departures hall.
Wilson, a lifelong New Yorker, first imagined this piece on a night flight.
All of the globes will be hung on different axes, with each land mass painted in a different color. It is the first time the artist has painted his work.
He said that he might have steered clear of it because his mother was a painter.
Aliza Nisenbaum has created a monumental portrait of the labor force at Terminal C.
Nisenbaum, who grew up in Mexico City and is now based in Queens, was interested in what it takes to run an airport and talking to the actual people who are the first faces that people meet when they arrive. The artist selected 16 employees from a large pool of Delta and Port Authority employees who had stories of service that inspired her.
Each one was painted from a combination of interviews and photographs. She is the first to translate her painting into a mosaic.
A vinyl reproduction of the finished painting hangs in Concourse F until a mosaic can be installed in a concourse yet to be built.
It is the only artwork in Delta's terminal behind a security checkpoint and Marzullo feels that is appropriate.
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