Underneath the gargantuan Citibank building that dominates the Queens skyline looking down on three story homes, is a mural. I had seen the mural many times before as I would pass it on my way home from school, but I had never understood what it meant. What I would see was what obviously was the skyline tiled in pale blues and reds outlined in black, a number of suns with red tile centers and long beams of reds, oranges and yellows. The part that really confused me was a giant orange balloon shape with a small circle that met with it. There is a black and blue hole on the small circle and from that s long wiry noodle springs, which goes up and down and loop de loop. The noodle like object is made of white and green. I had taken this malformed object with a noodle springing from it to be a potato. The black spot was an eye, and the noodle was perhaps a root, or something, I do not know what. Also coming from this small circle is a giant red ribbon that flows high and low, under sun and under rain. The background is what I took to be the sky, since it was made from many different shades of blue. So overall I understood the skyline, the sky, the suns, and the rain, but that potato and ribbon really threw me off. It turns out that the potato is really a shoe, and the root is actually a shoelace flowing from it. The red ribbon is really a squiggly leg. This piece is entitles Stream and was created by Elizabeth Murray in 2001. It was designed to represent the stream of travelers as they journey on their way to school, home, work, or wherever it is that they may be going. The piece is a permanent work in the station. Elizabeth Murray has also designed Blooming in the Lexington Avenue and 59th Street station. She is one of the very few female artists who have been honored with a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She passed away four years ago in 2007 from lung cancer. In her obituary by the New York Times she was stated as having “reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself…” Now that I know what the mural is, this is obvious in her work, and I can’t believe I missed it before.
