The Artists Paint in a Hole in the Ground. New York, New York! It’s a Heckuva Town!

When you come to visit New York City you might want to see some art of the children’s literary variety.  To do so you’ve a couple different options.  You could figure out where various artists are having shows.  You could find permanent locations around the city where their art is on display.  Or you could take the subway.

Every day I take the 2 or 3 train to work.  It’s a mere hop, skip, and a jump from my home, a twenty minute ride, and then a hop, skip and a jump to my workplace.  Often there are no seats so I stand in the aisles, my eyeballs prey to whatever advertisement happens to be floating before them.  That’s why I’ve always been so grateful for MTA’s Arts for Transit program.  Suddenly the dull minutes on the train are turned into a lovely game of Guess-the-Children’s-Author (yes, my life can essentially be boiled down to different moment of thinking about children’s books). For you see, suspended where an ad would normally go are these little art cards.  And many sport some familiar names.

In the past there were some lovely ones out there. The earliest one was by subway darling Peter Sis (who, if rumors are true, designed the art for an entire station somewhere as well).  It was essentially a colorized version of this:

Then for a little while in 2004 there the eclectic duo of Stefan Hagen and Sloane Tanen were all the rage.  Do you remember them?  They did books like Coco All Year Round and Where Is Coco Going? They were trendy for a little while, then disappeared entirely.  But while those two were shining in the sun, they made an art card too:

Back in 2008 Chris Gall, the man behind such fabulous books as Dinotrux and Dear Fish made this little beauty:

I like that on his website Gall writes of it, “And though many of you emailing me have claimed to see a metaphor for the Last Supper, any such similarity is strictly coincidental!”

It came out in 2011, but it was only recently that I noticed that R. Gregory Christie (most recently of It Jes’ Happened) had an art card of his own:

And last but not least in the least, Sophie Blackall (Big Red Lollipop and so much more) recently posted on her blog an encapsulation of her own poster, mentioning who she decided to include and who got cut.  She slices her poster into pieces for you to see.  Here’s my favorite section:

If you would like to buy any of the posters I’ve shown here today, you’re in luck.  the MTA store sells them for $25 with proceeds going directly to the not-for-profit New York Transit Museum’s exhibitions and education programs.  And you can see all the posters here (I’m sure there are a couple children’s illustrators lurking in there that I missed).

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