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This is a data-driven exploration of public art across New York City’s boroughs. This interactive piece uses the MTA Permanent Art Catalog dataset to visualize the various concentrations of art installations in the city’s transit system from 2000 to 2023. By dialing through the years, viewers activate LEDs within the borough shapes, illuminating them in proportion to the number of artworks for each selected year.
The piece was celebrated on the MTA Data & Analytics Blog as a bonus submission to their first Open Data Challenge.
Boroughs Illuminated
2024
Data physicalisation
representing a timeline
of subway art
Links
MTA Open Data Challenge
2024
Through this representation, we can see some interesting results emerge regarding the footprint of new artworks in each borough.
For example, we can see in 2006 that there's a large concentration of new artworks commissioned in the Bronx. Or similarly for Queens in 2011
The artwork dataset was joined with an MTA Subway Stations dataset to pull relevant borough details, cleaned up and then fed into a custom python pipeline to convert it into a format readable by arduino IDE.
The physical construction involved laser cutting a piece of cardboard using an outline of the city and then soldering LEDs on a thermocol layer behind it.
Process
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