MTA Arts & Design

Bay 50th Street

Dan Zeller

Internal Connectivity, 2012

Laminated glass in platform windscreens

Bay 50th station is adjacent to John Dewey High School and is one station away from Coney Island, which provides a natural setting for Dan Zeller’s detailed and intricate abstract drawings to address the connectivity of lives in an urban environment. Zeller studied satellite imagery, local streets, and biological systems along the West End Line (D) and interpreted them into abstract patterns. Six drawings were recreated in luminous color in laminated glass panels installed along the platform windscreens.

As the artist’s response to the site, these colorful images have an organic quality that is in concert with the green space next to the station and the nearby bay area. In his drawings, Zeller introduces colors and curvilinear elements to the rigid structure of the elevated train line, as it sweeps through the Brooklyn terrain. Among the drawings, the satellite view of Brooklyn surrounding the Bay 50th Street station may be most recognizable in some compositions. Others reflect varying degrees of abstraction that evolved from the satellite drawing and related images. The work represents an artist keenly aware of his surroundings and who makes it his own, as he illuminates and highlights the ways in which infrastructure, nature, and human activity interact and evolve.