About this Event
In the nearly three decades as Director at MTA Arts & Design, Sandra Bloodworthworked to transform New York's century-old transportation network into a vibrant public art museum, bringing art, music, and poetry to millions of transit riders. The department she led commissioned over 400 permanent artworks created in mosaic, ceramic, bronze, glass and mixed-media for the millions of people who ride the subway and commuter trains daily.
Grand Central Terminal has been a focal point, with public art projects spanning decades. Roberto Juarez NA’s A Field of Wild Flowers (1997), located at the waiting area in the Station Master's Office, was one of the early works created for the terminal's restoration. More recently, five individual mosaics by Kiki Smith NAwere installed across two levels of Grand Central Madison, the LIRR’s east side terminus inaugurated in early 2023: River Light; The Water’s Way; The Presence; The Spring; and The Sound. Bloodworth will be in dialogue with the artists, who will discuss their public works, fitting bookends to a period of significant growth and transformation for MTA Arts & Design.
The conversation will be moderated by Sara Reisman, Chief Curator, National Academy of Design.
RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required.
ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to info@nationalacademy.org.
About the Speakers
Sandra Bloodworth is principal of Bloodworth Arts International, where she continues to share her expertise as an advisor on public art and cultural initiatives. Drawing from her extensive career in arts administration, she speaks regularly on the power of public art to transform civic spaces and foster community engagement. Bloodworth is the former Director of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts & Design, the program responsible for visual and performing arts throughout the transit system. Under her leadership, the collection grew to include more than 400 public artworks in subway and rail stations, adding permanent works by Nick Cave NA, Elizabeth Murray, Jacob Lawrence NA, Kiki Smith NA, Ann Hamilton NA, Roberto Juarez NA, Firelei Báez,Vik Muniz, and Alex Katz NA, among many others. She has co-authored three books on the transit system’s public art collection, most recently Contemporary Art Underground, co-authored with Cheryl Hageman. In 2024, Bloodworth was awarded the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal for her extraordinary contribution to New York City. While Bloodworth is recognized as a leader in public art, she is also a dedicated painter working in oil, watercolor, and mixed media. Recently shifting her focus more fully to her artistic practice, she has begun exploring themes of climate change and environmental transformation in her work.
Roberto Juarez NA is a visual artist active in the areas of painting, printmaking, drawing, and large-scale public commissions throughout his career. He has completed public art projects and murals for the Miami International Airport, Grand Central Terminal, the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, Whitman College, and the University of Michigan College of Engineering. Born in Chicago of Puerto Rican and Mexican parents, he received artistic training at the San Francisco Art Institute followed by film studies at UCLA.
Juarez has had numerous solo and group shows at museums and galleries in the United States, Latin America, Europe and China. His work is included in major museum collections such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Denver Art Museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Newark Museum, and the Speed Art Museum.
Juarez has served on the boards of Creative Time, the Lower East Side Print Shop, Visual Aids, and the National Academy of Design. He has been a visiting lecturer at New York University, Brown University, and Williams College, and has led workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yale’s Norfolk Summer Program. Awards and recognition include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, being an Academician at the National Academy of Design and a Civitella Raineri Residency.
Kiki Smith NA has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary work that explores embodiment and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles. Smith has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide including over 25 museum exhibitions. Her work has been featured at five Venice Biennales, including the 2017 edition. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017 was awarded the title of Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Previously, Smith was recognized in 2006 by TIME Magazine as one of the “TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World.” Other awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2013 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at NYU and Columbia University.
Sara Reisman is a curator, educator, and writer based in New York City where, since 2021, she serves as Chief Curator at the National Academy of Design. From 2014 to 2021, she was Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, where she led the foundation’s art and social justice philanthropic initiative, curated more than a dozen thematic exhibitions, and authored and edited books focused on artists including Elia Alba, Pablo Helguera, and Suzanne Lacy, culminating in a two-volume book titled An Incomplete Archive of Activist Art (2022), published by Hirmer. From 2008 to 2014, Reisman was Director of New York City’s Percent for Art program at the Department of Cultural Affairs, where she managed more than 100 permanent public art commissions across New York City's five boroughs, working with artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jeffrey Gibson, Xu Bing, and Mary Mattingly, among many others. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania and SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and since 2016, is on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Masters Program. She received her BA at the University of Chicago and was a 2002-2003 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Image: “A Field of Wild Flowers” (1997) © Roberto Juarez, Grand Central Terminal. Courtesy of the National Academy of Design.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
National Academy of Design, 519 West 26th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
