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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

This is an addendum to my look at Nick Cave: Forothermore @ the Guggenheim Museum, here. 

Who am I? Detail of one of the figures in the section titled Every One. All works shown are Glass mosaic tiles and dated 2022 unless stated. Click any photo for full size.

Some of the most spectacular Art in New York is free and available to see & experience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. All you need to do to see it is pay a subway fare. All around town, MTA Arts & Design has succeeded in bringing a world-class roster of Artists to the City’s subway riders that rivals that of any museum¹. Created in 1985, MTA Arts & Design has been one of the most remarkable stories in NYC Public Art, if not Public Art anywhere.

Installation view of the entire first section, Each One, installed just outside the turnstiles at the One Times Square Entrance.

Recently, MTA Arts & Design completed the third and final section of Nick Cave’s monumental 3,200 square foot Permanent Public Art Work Under Times Square. Each One, Every One, Equal All, 2022 is installed in the 1,2,3,7,N,W & Shuttle station at 42nd Street & Times Square, perhaps the busiest station in the entire subway system. The project consists of a whopping FIFTY THREE figures² wearing Mr. Cave’s famous Soundsuits, each made up of countless incredibly intricate and fabulously colored glass mosaic tiles. A number of the original Soundsuits they are based on were displayed in Nick Cave: Forothermore at the Guggenheim Museum last winter, and some appear in my look at the show. The mosaics were fabricated by world-renowned Mayer of Munich (aka Franz Mayer & Co., founded in 1870), and are augmented by a recorded performance displayed on 11 video monitors.

Equal All. Installation view of the entire second section installed at the 42nd Street Shuttle.

As stunningly beautiful as they are, beauty is not the beginning or the end of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits. “The first Soundsuit was in ’92 in response to the Rodney King incident, the L.A. riots,” Mr. Cave recalled. “I was sitting in the park one day  and just sort of thinking about, What does it feel like to be  discarded, dismissed, profiled? There was this twig on the ground. And I looked at that twig as something discarded. And then I proceeded to just start collecting the twigs in the park. And I brought them all back to the studio. And then I started to build this sculpture. I started to realize that the moment I started to move in it, it made sound. Then it just literally put everything in perspective. I was building this suit of armor, something that I could shield myself from the world and society. And so out of that came this sculpture-performative kind of work.”³

The Soundsuits “hide gender, race, class. And they force you to look at the work without judgment. You know, we tend to want to categorize everything,” the Artist said. “We tend to want to find its place. How do we, sort of, be one on one with something that is unfamiliar?”⁴

Every One. Installation view of most of the section installed in the 42nd Street Connector which continues all the way down the corridor then wraps around the far end of it.

Here are some highlights of each section beginning with Each One, shown in its entirety earlier, which is installed in the entrance before you reach the turnstiles-

As amazing as the individual figures are, the backgrounds are endlessly varied, and different in each of the three sections.

After paying your fare, the second section is installed to the left, “framed” behind pillars as you approach it just before you reach the Shuttle further to the right-

The background is noticeably different than that of the other two sections, and characterized by having more color and more of a pattern.

I believe the actual Soundsuit this is mosaic depicts is made of twigs, and it may have been on view in Nick Cave: Forothermore at the Guggenheim. It appears in two pictures in my piece on the show.

Some highlights of the third, and longest, section, Every One in stalled in the 42nd Street Connector past the Shuttle–

Close-up of the head of the figure shown in the very first Photo in this piece.

This section includes 11 video monitors.

Screenshot of the Every One video featuring dancers wearing Soundsuits in a 3-minute video that is shown every 15 minutes, but you can see it in full below. Due to the fact it’s on 11 video monitors, the MTA had to compress the size of the video a bit-

Mosaics are one of the (if not the) most durable materials Art is made of. If you doubt that, visit The Met where you will see mosaics dating back to the 1st century BCE that retain every bit of their luster and beauty. The universe willing, the mosaics in the subway will outlive us all.

Installation view of the last section of Every One.

Displaying them in the subway, where the “melting pot” America is supposed to be all about, is on full display all the time- perhaps to a degree it is nowhere else in the country, is particularly poignant and powerful. It’s also very liberating to imagine oneself being one of these magical figures cavorting, dancing, leaping or flying all around us as we walk through them, anonymously.

The final figure of Every One, installed at the top of a staircase, looks like it’s about to take flight.

All of a sudden, a world where racism exists, doesn’t.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “One Nation Under A Groove,” by George Clinton & Funkadelic from the 1978 album of the same name. Nick Cave has frequently mentioned George Clinton as an early influence.

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