Bill Brand

September 17, 1980-ongoing
Myrtle Street subway station, Brooklyn (B, D, N, and Q lines)
Photo © 1980 Lisa Kahane

For Masstransiscope, Bill Brand presented an animated movie to passengers on the B, D, N, and Q subway trains coming into Manhattan from Brooklyn. The project was modeled after the zoetrope, a 19th-century optical toy which makes images inside a revolving cylinder appear to move as they are viewed through narrow slits, and pays tribute to Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. 228 hand-painted panels were mounted in a self-contained illuminated unit along the three hundred-foot platform of the vacant Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn. As a train moves past the screens, a sequence of colorful, abstract shapes progresses for twenty seconds. “I wanted to provide subway riders with the kind of delight experienced by the viewers of the first motion pictures and at the same time give people an opportunity to engage in a work of art as part of their daily life,” Brand explained. The project extends from Brand’s work with kinetic imagery as a means of manipulating color, line, rhythm, and figuration, and is also informed by discussions with perceptual psychologists, lighting designers and engineers, a machinist, and an architect held over the course of the three years Brand worked on the project.

Masstransiscope was realized in partnership with MTA Arts for Transit, and was the first completed public art project installed in any national transit facility to be funded by the NEA through its Art in Public Places program.