Overview
In a vault underneath Manhattan lay for one day only an illegal art exhibition in the dark. Over the past 12 months, over 100 artists have been escorted into the depths of a subway station that has been locked up for the past 100 years to create four creative stories as part of The Underbelly Project. The exhibition lasted for 24 hours only and was closed to the public, with only a select few having explored the street artworks (you can read about one such experience here).
So, what's the point? One New York Times reporter suggests the reason the lies in an avoidance of the art world, and world in general. And the curators agree. “We do want to preserve the kind of sacred quality of the place,” said PAC, “but we also want people to know it exists. And we want it to become part of the folklore of the urban art scene.”
The illegal project was born from the minds of and curated by street artists PAC and Workhorse, and the 103 contributors (eight of them Australian) are known only by Pseudonym, a safe precaution to take given that the project spurred rumours of trespassing, illegal property damage and potential terrorist accusations.
If you're in NYC and thinking about stumbling across the exhibition, think carefully before you do, apparently getting there involves "waiting at an active station’s platform until it’s empty, slipping from it into the damp and very dirty no man’s land beyond, and traversing that to get to the old station’s entrance".
[Via New York Times]