New York City's Second Avenue Subway is a wonderland of public art

Rush hour has never been so culturally enriching.

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The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) pleased modern architecture admirers while also supplying sharp-tongued critics with a generous helping of fodder earlier this year when it debuted Santiago Calatrava’s controversial and mega-costly World Trade Center transit hub. Now, starting Jan.1, the MTA is giving contemporary art buffs and straphangers alike something to take in and talk about at a quartet of subway stations — three of them new and one expanded — on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Together composing the first phase of the painfully long-awaited Second Avenue subway line, these four stations aren’t themselves works of art like Calatrava’s downtown transit hub, a soaring structure meant to evoke a bird in flight. However, the stations — 63rd Street, 72nd Street, 86th Street and 96th Street — are stuffed to the gills with enough detour-worthy public art to establish them as bona fide cultural attractions.

Cultural attractions — certainly a term you don’t frequently hear in direct reference to New York City Subway stations, even though more than a few boast eye-catching works of public art.

Essentially, you could regard the Second Avenue Subway’s art-adorned inaugural stations, heralded as the "largest permanent public art installation in New York history” by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as subterranean mini-museums. But unlike their non-MTA-operated aboveground counterparts, these museums will eventually also be home to pizza-lugging rats and a vast array of microbial life.

Each of the four stations, which are scheduled to be open to the public on Jan. 1 following considerable delay, is home to a major installation by a single esteemed artist: At 63rd Street is “Elevated,” a sprawling work in which Jean Shin brings to life archival photographs taken of and on Manhattan’s now-extinct elevated train lines with ceramic, glass and mosaic; the 72nd Street station is populated by “Perfect Strangers,” a photo-based mosaic installation by Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz; rendered in mosaic and ceramic tile, “Subway Portraits” is the latest from celebrity photorealist Chuck Close and can be found beneath the intersection of 86th Street and 2nd Avenue; lastly, Sarah Sze’s immersive “Blueprint for a Landscape” unfolds across the walls of the 96th Street station.

Shin, Muniz, Close and Sze were selected by the MTA from a pool of 300 noteworthy artists vying for a coveted gig that allowed them to treat the walls of four new subway stations as blank canvases.

While the installations at all four stations are remarkable in their own right, the Chuck Close installation at 86th Street will no doubt garner the most attention from out-of-towners and rubbernecking non-commuters considering that Close teeters into household name territory with his larger-than-life gridded portraits serving as crowd-drawing fixture at numerous major contemporary art museums across the world including New York's own Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. (The suggested/required adult admission price at both of these museums is $25 while a single ride on the subway costs $2.75).

What’s more, Close’s 12 “Subway Portraits,” each measuring nearly nine feet high, depict a few of the artist’s recognizable friends including musicians like the late Lou Reed and Philip Glass and artists Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker and Zhang Hua along with Close himself.

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