Amtrak's Art at Amtrak Project Transforms Penn Station with New Public Art

Amtrak's Art at Amtrak project, active since 2021, has commissioned two new public art installations at New York's Penn Station by Shoshanna Weinberger (born 1973, New Jersey) and David Rios Ferreira (born 1982, New York). Rios Ferreira's "Get Carried Away, You Have the Right" (2023) covers walls and four columns in the underground plaza with bright colors, futuristic elements, Indigenous forms, and imagery from Amtrak archives. Weinberger's "Travelling Through Horizons" (2023) in the adjacent atrium brings sky underground with gradients from morning orange to evening blue, geometric motifs evoking New York architecture, and stripes encoding social divisions like race, class, and politics. Both works were inaugurated in early August 2023 and remain on view until January 2024. The project is expanding beyond Penn Station: Union Station in Washington, D.C. will debut a commission by Tim Doud (born 1961, USA) in September 2023, on view until winter 2024, and Philadelphia's 30th Street Station will also participate. Penn Station, originally opened in 1910 above ground, was rebuilt underground in the 1960s due to rising costs, and has been managed since the 1990s by Amtrak, MTA, and New Jersey Transit. The debate over its preservation and modernization continues among New Yorkers.