Metro Art Los Angeles

Artwork and cultural programming in the Los Angeles Metro transit system, from the official Metro Art tumblr. #MetroArtLA || metro.net/art 

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Metro Art Highlights: Sonia Romero’s “MacArthur Park, Urban Oasis” (2010), Westlake/Macarthur Park Station.

Of late I can’t but help to notice the air of fierce froideur amid you and me and everyone else in between. Our age-old sense of concord and kinship has been brutalized and coarsened by the unburnished bluster and bugaboos that dominate the day. Traffic terrible. Televisions too loud and screens too bright. And our camaraderie too, too faint.

But hup from some happenstance. Artist Sonia Romero has fixed an elixir that can flick away any fluster. Tapping into heretofore unexplored sources of imagination and sureness. Redirecting a reservoir that empties directly into your dreams. You’ll find yourself experiencing an inner tectonic shift of renewal as you secern truth among the tiled tableaus.

Thirteen ceramic mosaic artworks challenge you to bridge differences and overturn prejudices. Hewed with heart and chutzpah, Romero presents MacArthur Park as an urbanite wellspring. A fountainhead of hope forever replenishable. Lovingly portrayed are art deco motifs and local historical buildings populated by the diverse and dignified denizens along Wilshire. Ponder the Park Plaza, paddleboat pastimes, pyramids, paleteros, and prodigious amounts of promise that adorn the artwork.

The artist’s métier is making the mundane into the miraculous. Romero regards, "I found the story of the park and its fluctuating energy stimulating and intriguing. I developed my concept around the idea that MacArthur Park is an urban oasis. It was my goal to create a public work, which celebrated the 120-year-old history of MacArthur Park and the people who make use of it."

Friendliness can no longer be a forgotten language. Let’s conjugate the lost verbs of comity again. And recapture the innocence to our jaded eyes.

My hand is extended. Moreover, my fingers unwound to wrest rapport. My tongue coiled with a kind word custom-cobbled just for you.

“Hello.”  

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Metro Art Highlights: Raoul de la Sota’s “Highland Park” (2003), Through the Eyes of Artists.

It’s a scatter of heavenly bodies and sumptuous startlements. There’s an initial prickly dread that soon gives way to a soothing sangfroid when looking upon Raoul de la Sota’s twilit artwork depicting the inky pitch of evening enshrouding Highland Park homes and faraway cityscapes. The artist lassos up a rope of LA longitude and hauls in whole constellations above too.

De la Sota sounds off, “Night has fallen and lights from traffic, houses and businesses glow in the dark. From the reddened horizon the sky deepens upward into night and onto that night is etched the stars and constellations of the ancient peoples.”

It’s an atmospheric urban arrangement crepuscular in contour. Mickle and immense in magnitude provoking the poetry in a person who didn’t realize had poetry residing in them.

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Metro Art Highlights: Sam Comen’s “En Route” (2014), Photographic Lightbox Series.

The squeak of frantic feet fumble the strapped-for-time shuffle across the linoleum floor of Union Station inspires much suspiration. The clock croaks cruel as joie de vivre is threshed and before you stretches unending encumbrance and perceived impedimenta as far as the eye can see. Your brain feels dislocated as Monday morning snaffles any pittance of the palmy serotonin lingering from the weekend while.    

But art doth attenuate the affect of the waffle and poppycock. And artist Sam Comen has decided to wallpaper the corridors of your cranium with prepossessing portraiture inviting a full-fledged melee of mercurial heartsomeness into the mitching mind.

The artist celluloid-ly captured these commuters and induced mundane moments into occasions of pomp and pageantry. In these images is proffered the uncommon gift of poetry and paradox. Just acres and acres of hemmed-in humanity within the frames. The toilworn times transformed into triumphs twice-over.  

The artist bethinks and bandies, "I'm interested in exploring the character of historically significant sites by shooting a series of environmental portraits of the people who live and work in those locales. Union Station is the beating heart of the vast urban physiology of Los Angeles and its commuters and travelers are a microcosm of the surrounding city and county."

@samcomen

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Metro Art Highlights: Artemio Rodriguez’s “East Los Angeles” (2003), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Look closer between the sprawling moss and maudlin mourning that adheres to the gravestones and perhaps you’ll discover a newfound vigor for life. The cemeteries suggest a strong sense of commemoration within the community and a link with East Los Angeles’ diverse history and quiet chronicles. A vehement veneration for the family and a piety for the past.

Rodriguez recounts, “There are at least six cemeteries in East LA…I think of a cemetery as a museum, a park and a garden. There you will find beautiful art pieces in the open air, palms and flowers.”

The wick of the votive candles have long been doused and dried are the flowers wilted and wan. What remains are the memories of the dear, dear departed.

Recalled fondly and with ardor.

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Metro Art Highlights: Jody Zellen’s “Miracle Mile” (2003), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Augment your apperceptions with photographer Jody Zellen’s hitherto hope-hoarding humdinger of an artwork. The collage of photos provide a peripatetic pause as you wander and ponder the patterns and place-making that is the Miracle Mile region. The images are copious and curious and beg to be deciphered. Images of the Art Deco architecture of the Wiltern Theater to the fortissimo flurry of found-freneticism of Wilshire Boulevard.

Feed from the frantic pace of the city. Be nourished and none-too-concerned by the blinking traffic light and blinkered grumble, grumble of those impatiently shuffling behind you. Life’s too short to not take it all in. So loaf a little and drag your heels here.

Foment some frittering, for crying out loud.

Zellen tenders, “In my photographic work I juxtapose images of old and new cities reflecting a sense of nostalgia for the past contrasted with wonder about the future. Through a bombardment of disparate images, my pieces celebrate the complexity and unpredictability of city spaces.”

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Metro Art Highlights: Sam Pace’s “Leimert Park” (2004), Through the Eyes of Artists.

The out and out gadabout nature of Sam Pace’s artwork celebrating the pluperfect panoply of jazz, blues, and poetry of Leimert Park will recapture your wonder. The figures evoke a footloose and fancy-free fais do-do of frenetic fun-having and perform a daring demi entrechat of enchantment.

Pace puts it, “I wanted to capture this unique area of Los Angeles…it’s a Mecca for African American culture, and I feel that it’s time to share it with the rest the world. This project is one way that I can help accomplish this goal.”

You know you know this song. You needn’t resist the urge to undulate and undo your inhibitions.

So bebop and start swinging like it’s the last song of the night already.

Dance before the dawn starts to yawn.  

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Metro Art Highlights: Christofer C. Dierdorff’s “The Intimacy of Place” (2012), LATCC/Ortho Institute Station.

It’s a salvo of mile-wide smiles welcoming commuters to the station at 23rd Street. You can count on these warm community countenances to communicate comity to you and yours quickly. Fabricated in porcelain enamel steel, artist Christofer C. Dierdorff has assembled an able and always amiable audience of intimate artwork plying a warm rapport and loosening the laces of any lingering dilemmas of the day.

Twelve portraitures are portrayed in surroundings that convey their commitment to the community. An olio of occupations are honestly highlighted in this friendliness-focused photographic series. The professions featured range from firefighter and mechanic to pastry chef and haderdasher. It’s a neighborly menagerie of go-to geniality.

So through the brambles and bracken of the wreck-ridden day huddled with hogwash, we find hard-earned harmony with the straphanger stranger riding beside you. Joie de vivre recovered. “This sea of wondrous faces is Metro. Metro is not about people, Metro is people – thousands and thousands of different people every day. Each with their own story, their own worries, their own triumphs and their own tragedies – each different, each rare, each unique and each irreplaceable. The people who ride Metro every day are the same people from your favorite memory. They are your grandmother, your mother, your sister and your best friend. This artwork celebrates those people,” the artist upholds and heralds.

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Metro Art Highlights: Danny Heller’s “Chatsworth” (2011), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Be bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by Danny Heller’s vehicularly vernal view of Chatsworth landmark Stoney Point. Dilly-dally and be undaunted as the artist celebrates the classic kustom kulture and equestrian heritage that encapsulates this particular pocket of LA County.

There’s a straight six under this hood that grumbles sensually as it shifts into the next gear. The whitewalls sunlit and the hubcaps buffed to a mirror sheen. It’s every category of cool gliding off with your youthful memories of drive-ins, sock-hops, and sleepy summer surf ballads.  

Heller upholds, "I really want to give a sense of the still very open landscape of this part of the valley. The classic car culture out here is pretty big and it helps to show the main thoroughfare through town: Topanga Canyon Blvd. Stoney Point/Rocky Peak is also an iconic feature of the landscape."

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Metro Art Highlights: Phung Huynh’s “In the Meadow” (2014), El Monte Station.

Clear a little space in the cubby of your cardio-containing crevasse (read: heart) for a clever colloquy with Phung Huynh’s unharried and unhurried picturesque art panels all abubble with abject amity via rich symbolic and metaphoric imagery. Mexican and Chinese cut paper folk art traditions combine with the practice of Japanese woodblock prints to hew a high-spirited homage to El Monte’s idyllic and agrarian past. It’ll inflame the imagination and balk any bunkum raddling your mindful frittering.

The color palette is another peachy purveyor of playful purpose as it reflects the hues and blush of the surrounding succulents and wryly asks why we aren’t taking more time from defatigable soul-depleting days to be taken aback and on tenterhooks again by the ardor-amplifying sundry drupe and hesperidium art affords apace.

The artist compels us to cloud-count, “I am familiar with the city of El Monte and its surrounding areas in the San Gabriel Valley. The city’s tranquil yet powerful presence in greater Los Angeles is an exciting subject to explore in public art.”

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Metro Art Highlights: Cynthia Evans’ “Hermosa Beach” (2007), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Slather on the spit and slap on a crinkly stamp to send a mirthful missive to mitigate the Mondays like Cynthia Evans’ stupifracturous vintage postcard artwork. Celebrating Hermosa  Beach’s centennial, it’s an inspiriting zoetrope of beach culture that commemorates the city’s historic lifeguard tradition, recognizable pier, and 1930s surf-lore in all its spumy glory.  

Evans establishes, “I wanted this painting to look fun, since the beach is definitely that. It is loosely based on vintage postcards and features old fashioned bathing costumes, a historic map and made up postage stamps.”

So come and race face-first into the salty spray of sea. For the waves whisper your name. Between pursed lips of seaweed and salad days of summer scamperings.  

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Metro Art Highlights: Roy Dowell’s “Constructed Histories” (2006), Canoga Station.

The nearby freeway belches plumes of humbug and hazardous haze. The argle-bargle and foofaraw of the bumper-to-bumper vehicular stalemate that is the morning commute prostrates and unhinges the mental wellbeing. Lo, the frown-filled 405 has you at your glummest.

Time to give your imagination some room to roam and be swept away under the avalanche of art that is Roy Dowell’s terrazzo paving and porcelain enamel steel platform panels. The abstract images swat away any fiddle-faddle and fuss and suddenly you’re free to frolic fancy-free unfettered again.

Dowell delivers a doozy of a divulgence, “My work alludes to a history of accumulated information and use as it invites the viewer to position themselves as both the interpreter and creator of a new history. Their lives and experiences feed the meaning and intent of the pieces that I have created for this site.”

Rest easy and evermore. For your day is imperiled no longer.

Finished, fini, and kaput.

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Metro Art Highlights: Manny Cosentino’s “Echo Park” (2004), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Wax on and wax off and walk the Elysium that is Manny Cosentino’s oil on canvas painting depicting a soughing and sleepy scene in Echo Park. The artist lays before us a lush moire of magic hour colors. Among the crabgrass and craggy flax, one might find remnants of a quickly retreating summer.

The days and weeks and months quicken their pace. So remind yourself to assign an hour for an assignation with art on occasion. To perhaps uncover long-lost estival arpeggios embedded in the mossy shore stones. Flip a few and skip a few. And watch the ripples spread and root out any remaining ruths from your quickly improving day.    

Cosentino cogitates on the setting, “There it was all laid out before me: the palm trees, Echo Park Lake, the boathouse, Rafa doing Tai chi (like he did so many mornings) and breaking through the mist in the distance, the skyscrapers of Downtown.”

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Metro Art Highlights: Pat Warner’s “What We See” (2005), Pierce College Station.

Step onto the sun-scalded asphalt and be reacquainted with the arch-beauty of Pat Warner’s terrazzo and porcelain enamel artwork. It’s aflutter with feathers and flowers that fuddle and feature the good work of Pierce College’s agricultural programs. Nature and horticulture hold court as you’re ambushed by foliage and flocks of hawks, mockingbirds, and warblers. It’s an avalanche of aviary imagery.

Warner endues nimbly, “I am always amazed at how much life there is around us, aside from ourselves, when we make the effort to observe.”

Let’s all look, listen, and observe awhile. And hear that creak of new nature-ly knowledge wedging its way into our wisdom wherewithal.

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Metro Art Highlights: Walter Askin’s “Pasadena” (2003), Through the Eyes of Artists.

Grab a horn and let’s hear you “heigh-ho!” as you join the piping procession parading through Pasadena. These wholesome and high-spirited figures boast a buoyant bacchanal that will march right into your heart and dismantle any melancholy that might mire you woe by woe by woe.  

Askin asserts, “…the real joy as an artist is to create work filled with delight, work that is more calm, more serene, more alive, more playful, more energized, more focused, more directed and more life filled for the time that we’re here.”

This particular artwork was awarded a Silver Medal from the Los Angeles Society of Illustrators.

Pick up the pace, peppy people. And follow the trail of confetti and carefree carousing.

Destination: Diligent fiddledeedee dilly-dallying.

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Metro Art Highlights: Mark Lere’s “The Metro Machine” (2007), Division 9.

Stray and digress awhile at this artful array of visual anoesis. Artist Mark Lere lends a thaumaturgical touch to a widespread epoxy terrazzo artwork that’ll help run roughshod over any ramstuginous day.

The installation entails nine-hundred square feet of four color terrazzo containing aluminum strip inserts that serve a sensorium effect with a pell-mell of shapes, texts, and symbols.  

There’s a weird wisdom wallowing in the artwork. The artist has wefted in images of cogs and gears of trains, buses, and bicycles all seamlessly sewn together and interconnected like the well-oiled apparatus that Metro is.  

Lere enlightens, “This installation is based on the workings of the transit district and its job of working as a well-oiled machine.”

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Metro Art Highlights: Mary Kay Wilson’s “San Fernando” (2012), Through the Eyes of Artists.

The week may thieve and aggrieve but you can outright wring away those dishwater gray days by colliding your eyes on Mary Kay Wilson’s ensorcelling watercolor of the 1797 Mission San Fernando. Have a wistful wander-about winding a way through the Mission gardens. Regain the world again by withdrawing among the sun-struck shades of Roman arch tiled rooftops and adobe walls and willowwacks of exposed wood beams. These architectural features are unusually communicative in a reserved way as they still serve as design inspirations in Southern California today.    

The artwork reveals and revels in an ocean view of possibilities. That hoary horizon hiccups. The sparrow flits about uncertain. Allowing luciferous leaves to judder and unjar joules of sotto voce esperance.

Life.

Scruff.

Go a-grabbin’.

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Metro Art Highlights: Michele Martinez’s “Todos Vuelven/Everyone Returns” (2005), Sepulveda Station.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and be buoyantly besotted by Michele Martinez’s porcelain enamel steel panels and terrazzo designs. The station platforms are awash in awe with pre-Columbian glyphs and symbology from Apatzingan. It ain’t just quaint as it’ll also collapse your quiescence with maps outlining the migratory path of roving Monarch butterflies.

Martinez musters, “These designs are my tribute to the Sepulveda Wildlife Reserve and the efforts of people who strive to protect natural habitats.”

Be bushwhacked by a bonnie bouquet of buttorfleoge. The artwork is earnestly entomological and assails us with an abundance of Arcadian idyll.    

So tighten your grip on the handrail.

Lest you be blown astray by the dainty flap of weightless wings.