It’s Metropolitan Transportation Amazing!
New York City Transit unveiled three colorful mosaics by Hunter art professor and alumna Lisa Corinne Davis MFA ’83 at the 68th Street – Hunter College subway station December 20.
The abstract works, Tempestuous Terrain and the two-part Liminal Location, were commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and NYCT and fabricated by Mayer of Munich in a swirling sea of blue, orange, red, and yellow glass.
Davis said she worked on the projects for about a year and a half.
“As a graduate of Hunter’s MFA program and as a professor, I have had many years to observe the muscular congregation of the mostly white and wealthy residents of the neighborhood with the racial, ethnic, religious, economic, and political diversity of the Hunter College population,” Davis said. “Their interaction fills this station with ample evidence of both the realities and aspirations of social and geographic mobility. It is a place where intersecting worlds collide and coexist en route to other actual, metaphorical, or metaphysical destinations.”
She added that the fragmentary medium of mosaic is uniquely suited to convey the “experience of these fleeting, densely networked, and oblique human narratives as they move through time and space.”
Ruth Stanton Chair of the Art and Art History Department Sara Greenberger Rafferty said that it was “an incredible gift to New York City and to Hunter College to have large-scale artworks by Professor Davis at our namesake subway station.”
The unveiling also gave the public a look at the refurbished station and new elevator that makes it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“For Hunter — with 23,000 students, most of whom commute to this campus, plus thousands of faculty and staff members — the 68 Street – Hunter College station is a vital organ through which our lifeblood courses every day,” said Hunter College President Nancy Cantor. “So, the spectacular upgrades to this station could not be more deeply appreciated, from the unprecedented accessibility features to the inspirational mural by Hunter’s own Professor Lisa Corinne Davis that evokes the ebb and flow of our amazingly diverse community. We’re profoundly grateful to the MTA and its partners who have so thoughtfully reimagined this vibrant portal to Hunter and the neighborhood.”
Davis, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, is best known for her abstract paintings and works on paper that resemble multilayered maps she describes as “inventive geography” to explore perceptions of racial, social, and psychological identity.
Davis’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe and have been included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
A Baltimore native, Davis earned her MFA at Hunter in 1983 and joined its faculty in 2002. She earlier taught at the Yale University School of Art. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, four artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pollock – Krasner Foundation Grant, and was recognized with a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.
Hunter’s Department of Art and Art History unites the academic study of art history and studio art alongside public-facing art galleries. It offers BA, BFA, MA, and MFA degrees as well as a curatorial certificate.
