The Art of Transit: See Work by Otis College Alumni and Faculty In L.A. Metro’s Newest Rail Stations
The latest works continue an Otis legacy that dates back to Metro’s earliest stations of the 1990s.
The work of Otis College alumni, faculty, and students can be seen publicly throughout Los Angeles—on murals as you drive downtown, as sculptures in outdoor art spaces, on the many billboards that pepper the busiest thoroughfares, and in several L.A. Metro rail stations.
Continuing a tradition that began with alums such as Roberto Gil de Montes (’72 BFA Fine Arts, ’76 MFA Fine Arts) and faculty like Renée Petropoulos, who created artwork for some of the system’s first rail stations in the 1990s, the Otis community features prominently in several of Metro’s newest stations.
D Line Extension
The newest additions to the region’s sprawling public transportation network are the expansion stations of the Metro D Line traveling through the Miracle Mile in central L.A. Travelers stopping at the Wilshire/La Cienega station can take in 156-foot murals by Otis instructor Soo Kim, the director of the Photography area of emphasis in the Fine Arts program and head of the Critic-in-Residence series, which connects Otis students with prominent artists, curators, and thinkers.
Titled Night / Quartz, Kim’s murals feature a dreamlike cityscape created when she took photographs of buildings along the Wilshire Corridor and used them as stencil-like silhouettes over photos of cities around the world. For another mural Kim combined several maps into a playful, abstract composition. “As riders pass through the space, they are invited to pause and wander through this reimagined landscape where the rhythm of the city is reassembled through the lens of global connection and local imagination,” writes the Metro’s description of the piece.
Two stops away at the Wilshire/La Brea station is Miracle of La Brea by Mark Dean Veca (’85 BFA Fine Arts), who created one of his three murals—measuring 12 by 48 feet—by referencing Art Deco motifs found in the neighboring Wilshire Tower building. Veca’s illustrations in all three murals mimic the look of tar—the famed La Brea Tar Pits are nearby—and in two of the works, he evokes iconography drawn from stories of the community: an ice cream cone to commemorate memories of getting ice cream at the area’s bygone Carnation Building soda fountain, for example. Veca rendered these motifs in a kaleidoscopic fashion.
“Tar is inextricably linked with the identity of the Miracle Mile and Hancock Park. As the trains will be traveling underground through tunnels that have been dug in and around ancient tar deposits, my surreal artwork will acknowledge the reality of the surrounding geology,” Veca says in his artist statement.
K Line Extension
The K Line, which winds through South Los Angeles and connects to the new LAX/Metro Transit Center at the Los Angeles International Airport, features the We Are… Portraits of Metro Riders by Local Artists series that includes work by several Otis College faculty and alumni: Tiffany Lin (Assistant Professor in Illustration); Edwin Ushiro (Senior Lecturer in Game and Entertainment Design, Illustration, and Animation); Omar Martinez (’12 BFA Graphic Design); and Lanise Howard (’20 BFA Fine Arts), among them.
We Are… features portraits by over 40 artists and is meant to celebrate the diversity of L.A.’s travelers and the community experienced in journeying together across the city’s buses, trains, and stations. For these pieces, each artist was selected for their relationship to the neighborhoods served by the Metro system.
