Creative Time and MTA Arts & Design Announce If you hear something, free something A public art project in sound by Chloë Bass
August 14th, 2025
For Immediate Release
The commission is the first sound work by artist Chloë Bass and will play through announcements in key subway station mezzanines, reaching hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, in the first innovative artist project on the MTA broadcast system.
New York, NY – August 14th, 2025 – Creative Time, in partnership with MTA Arts & Design, announces the debut of a new commission by artist Chloë Bass. Titled If you hear something, free something, Bass’s sound work will engage MTA’s public announcement system, reaching the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors who use New York City Transit’s services daily. This monumental audio art exhibition will consider the standard purposes of public address, providing riders with a fleeting moment of everyday connection. Coinciding with MTA Arts & Design’s 40th anniversary, the sonic artwork will begin playing on September 3, 2025 and run through October 5, 2025. A press preview and public performance will take place on September 3rd at 12pm at Fulton Center.
Chloë Bass is well known for her multidimensional practice which uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. Bass has worked in performance, conversation, publication, and installation; however, If you hear something, free something is her first sound project and the first artist-led engagement with the MTA’s PA system. The sonic artwork—in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Kreyòl, and Mandarin—will play intermittently in key station mezzanines, reaching hundreds of thousands of riders. ASL translations will be available on Creative Time’s website. Each recording will begin with a custom tone, designed by Bass in collaboration with artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, followed by one of 24 total announcements spoken by professional performers and everyday New Yorkers. To arrive at each poetic announcement, Bass assembled a series of focus groups that gathered a cross section of people who interface with the transit system regularly—teens, adults, transit advocates, and MTA workers—to consider what sounds and stories might call us to somewhere familiar, or bring us to a place of ease.
The soundscape of the city affects its residents’ quality of life. Noise regulates the body’s nervous system, and it can directly affect people’s willingness to participate in shared experiences and to help strangers. To move beyond courtesy and into connection, Bass plays critically with two well-known public information campaign slogans: “If You See Something, Say Something” and “Courtesy Counts.” At the height of the Cold War, emergency broadcast systems were created in order to alert citizens of geopolitical threats. In the wake of 9/11, a series of new campaigns were initiated across New York to encourage heightened awareness of one’s neighbors and surroundings. If you hear something, free something speaks to the long history of the MTA as an important site of public address.
FROM ARTIST, CHLOË BASS
“We’re used to thinking of certain conditions as given, when they’re actually a product of design. If you hear something, free something offers one opportunity to feel how a system might be different, or introduce us to other possibilities, if it were designed with a more open emotional mindset. It’s not just about the announcements. It’s about the ways we feel together in public space.”
FROM CURATOR, DIYA VIJ
“If you hear something, free something engages the largest transit system in the Western Hemisphere, a place where an incredible complexity of public life unfolds. The MTA serves millions of New York City residents daily, spanning every single neighborhood and social boundary. It is where every denomination of New York City meets. For this truly public art work, Bass offers a monumental but fleeting gesture that seeks to change the way we relate to each other in public life and public space. She asks us to consider, if we change what we hear, can we change how we feel, and in turn, will we be better neighbors?”
FROM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JUSTINE LUDWIG
“Bass aims to connect everyday actions to a bigger picture of community and care. In a city of millions of people, this work is an antidote to isolation and apathy, it is an invitation toward shared experience and wonder. This project is Creative Time’s fifth collaboration with MTA Arts & Design (formerly MTA Arts for Transit) and we’re proud to further our organizations’ shared commitment to activating public spaces as places for meaningful connection through the arts.”
OPENING PERFORMANCE
On September 3rd at 12pm in the Fulton Center, the project will launch with a new, live performance composed by Bass with ten performers, four of whom were involved in the original recordings. Scattered throughout the Fulton Center atrium, the performers will be mixed among everyday transit riders and will usher in new forms of public address and communal care. It is also an opportunity to hear the entire sonic artwork—all 24 announcements—in a single context.
To attend, kindly RSVP with Van Lundsgaard (van@hellothirdeye.com).
Detailed information regarding the timing, frequency, and locations of If you hear something, free something is forthcoming.
ABOUT CHLOË BASS
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation. Bass has been exhibited and published at major institutions around the world, including recent solo exhibits at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, California African American Museum at A+P, Skirball Cultural Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. Recently, MTA Arts & Design unveiled Chloë Bass’s permanent public artwork: Personal Choice #5, 2023, in the Lorimer Street L train subway station, invites riders to reflect on shared lived experience, connection, and physical and emotional proximity in New York City.
ABOUT CREATIVE TIME
Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented over 350 ambitious public art projects in partnership with thousands of artists and organizations throughout New York City, across the country, around the world—and even in outer space. Our work is guided by three core values: art matters, artists’ voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression.
We are acclaimed for the innovative and meaningful projects we have commissioned, from Tribute in Light (2002), the twin beacons of light that illuminated lower Manhattan six months after 9/11, to Kara Walker’s powerful sugar-sphinx at the Domino Sugar Factory (2014), and Pedro Reyes’s Doomocracy (2016), a theatrical haunted house of political nightmares at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and so much more. Though based in New York City, our organization touches millions, both nationally and internationally, through initiatives like the Creative Time Summit, which has been presented in a variety of locations including Venice, Stockholm, Washington, D.C., and Miami. We are committed to presenting important art for our times and engaging broad audiences that transcend geographic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers.
ABOUT MTA ARTS & DESIGN
MTA Arts & Design encourages the use of public transportation by providing visual and performing arts in the New York metropolitan area. The Percent for Art program is one of the largest and most diverse collections of site-specific public art in the world, with more than 400 commissions by world-famous, mid-career and emerging artists. Arts & Design produces Graphic Arts, Digital Art, photographic Lightbox exhibitions, as well as live musical performances in stations through its Music Under New York (MTA MUSIC) program, and the Poetry in Motion program in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America. It serves the millions of people who rely upon MTA subways and commuter trains and strives to create meaningful connections between sites, neighborhoods, and people.
PROJECT SUPPORT
Project support for Chloë Bass’s If you hear something, free something is provided by Molly Gochman, Eric Richter and Charles Shoener, The New York Community Trust, VIA Art Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The MAP Fund, and Trellis Art Fund.
We are also grateful for the support of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams.
Creative Time programming support for 2025 has been generously provided by the Mellon Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
MEDIA CONTACT
THIRD EYE
Van Lundsgaard | van@hellothirdeye.com | 212-355-9009
CREATIVE TIME
Gloria Celeste Perez | gloriap@creativetime.org | 203-521-1786
MTA
MTA Arts & Design | arts@mtahq.org | 212-878-7250
IMAGE:
Artistic Direction: Riley Hooker for Chaos and Precision
Photo: Ally Caple
Image available on request.
