 hosted by Public Art Fund and Cooper Union about his new permanent public commission 

, 2020, a photographic series that reconstructs nine remarkable but forgotten moments from the history of the original Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963).

On January 1, 2021, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced the opening of the new Moynihan Train Hall, along with three unprecedented site-specific art installations by 

, artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, and Kehinde Wiley, counted among the most innovative and revered artists working today. As part of the Governor’s visionary transformation of the nation’s busiest transportation hub, the artworks are commissioned through a partnership between Empire State Development (New York State’s economic development agency) and Public Art Fund (the leading non-profit that commissions and presents art in public spaces). A testament to New York’s creativity, diversity, and richly layered heritage, the three monumental commissions complement the new cutting-edge Train Hall, while embracing its civic character. Offering the public a fresh perspective on the history and grandeur of the original Pennsylvania Station and James A. Farley Post Office, Douglas’s, Elmgreen & Dragset’s, and Wiley’s installations bring a sense of wonder and humanity to these public spaces, and will evoke civic pride and delight for generations to come.

Douglas's work, titled 

, draws on archival research to reconstruct nine remarkable but forgotten moments from the history of the original Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963) that capture the serendipity and poignancy of daily life. These vivid evocations of the city’s forgotten history include Bert Williams (singer, comedian, and the first African-American to direct a motion picture) instigating an impromptu vaudeville show with fellow performers stranded in the station during an epic snow storm of 1914, the final moments of affection between soldiers and their loved ones before being deployed in 1941 for duty during World War II, and the soundstage from director Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 love story 

, staring Judy Garland.

Douglas photographed live actors in period costume and seamlessly combined them with digitally recreated interiors of the demolished station. The resulting images pay tribute to McKim, Mead & White’s original station, and to the layers of human experience that bring our civic spaces to life. The series of photographic panels are located within four seating alcoves in The Ticketed Waiting Room.

All permanent installations are now on view.

Read more in 

, 2020. Commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund for Moynihan Train Hall. Photo by Nicholas Knight

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On his commission for Penn Station's Half Century

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From Wolfgang Tillmans’s foundation Between Bridges

2020Solidarity Posters

Growing up and as an artist, Baldwin had a great interest in masks—the masks of blackness and maleness, the various roles we appropriate or condemn the better to define ourselves.

So much of this begins with his father, David. David Baldwin is a significant figure in a lot of Baldwin’s most emotional and personal texts. In his book about movies, 

, he said he had written too much and too little about this man who was not his biological father.

For most of his adult life, David Baldwin was a Baptist minister. As a man, James Baldwin said that he didn’t understand what his father must have seen growing up in Louisiana, the horror of lynchings, segregation, and forced labor, until he went South himself. Many years ago, I wrote an essay for a book about lynching photography in America. People actually sent postcards and collected this horror, and the project was so upsetting that I didn’t keep a copy of the book for myself.

I felt it was important, though, for us to see what David Baldwin had seen, and the lynching photographs I included show something devastating that affects the mind in profound ways, a black man about to be lynched. The images are about the preparation of a holocaust, in effect. And when David Baldwin left Louisiana, and Baldwin’s mother, Berdice, left Maryland, they were fleeing the kind of world where this was a given, not an exception.

David Baldwin was a native of Louisiana who marginalized his eldest adopted son by calling him ugly and treating him with scorn. How to make art out of that, because all art grows out of love or need? How to deal with David Baldwin and the legacy of ugliness that he passed on to his son, who, thank God, drew a line between accepting his father’s scorn and trying to remake his body as something free of that? These are the questions James Baldwin, the artist, tried page after page after page to answer.

—Hilton Als, based on his introduction to the exhibition 

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face. Many years ago in poverty and uncertainty, Beauford and I would walk together through the streets of New York City. He was then, and is now, working all the time, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is seeing all the time; and the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.

Read James Baldwin's introduction to the exhibition catalogue for 

James Baldwin, “Introduction to Exhibition of Beauford Delaney Opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert,” in 

Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective, (The Studio Museum in Harlem

James Baldwin with bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhandler

“The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.’’

James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney

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A moving, complicated, and at times ecstatic conversation between two groundbreaking women. The artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who was raised in Nigeria and now lives in Los Angeles, and the Booker Prize-nominated writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was born in Zimbabwe and educated in England, examine their personal experiences with protest, government corruption, Trump’s America, the erosion of indigenous culture, and ongoing missions to center their African and immigrant stories in their art.

Dangarembga’s new novel, 

. In July, Dangarembga was arrested in Zimbabwe, protesting government corruption. She’s currently out on bail, but her trial is still pending.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Tsitsi Dangarembga

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

 (b. 1979), on view at the gallery’s Paris location. This is the Romanian-born, New York–based artist’s debut solo presentation with David Zwirner since the gallery announced representation in July 2020, and her first solo exhibition in France.

Over the past decade, Ursuţa has gained recognition for her inventive sculptural work that mines the darker undercurrents of contemporary society.

Drawing from memory, nostalgia, art history, and popular culture and employing a variety of media, the artist merges traditional sculptural processes and new technologies to transform commonplace objects and materials into viscerally evocative sculptures and installations that give new, redemptive form to subjective experience.

Ursuţa’s sculpture 

 (2020) was featured in the gallery’s 2020 group exhibition 20/20 at David Zwirner New York.

Image: Andra Ursuta, Predators 'R Us, 2020 (detail)

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Learn more about this exhibition at our Paris gallery

Andra Ursuţa: Void Fill

Andra Ursuţa Void Fill

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.