New York's MTA Arts & Design has commissioned three artists — Ivan Forde, Trevor Paglen and Howardena Pindell — to create permanent artworks for the city's transit network, in a new round of commissions announced this week. The projects will bring large-scale contemporary art into subway and Metro-North stations, reaching millions of daily riders.

At Broadway Junction, the Brooklyn subway station, Forde will create a large mosaic titled "Bedtime Story for Brownsville: The Fish Who Carried the Moon", imagining flying fish carrying the moon from the ocean floor into the sky. The work draws on storytelling and the life of the surrounding Brownsville neighbourhood, continuing the programme's habit of rooting station art in the communities it serves.

Trevor Paglen's "Perennial" will occupy a pedestrian overpass and a new parking garage at Metro-North's Southeast station, where an algorithm will translate the colours of plants growing near the station into an abstract spectrum of light. Howardena Pindell, meanwhile, is making a glass installation for Metro-North's Botanical Garden station, inspired by the neighbouring New York Botanical Garden.

MTA Arts & Design has commissioned more than 400 permanent artworks since the programme began in 1985, installing work in over 260 stations across the New York region. Artists are chosen through a competitive selection process involving arts professionals. The new commissions extend that collection into both the subway and the commuter rail network, treating stations not as blank infrastructure but as civic spaces where art is part of the daily journey. The programme's wider collection already spans subway and railroad stations, train cars and bus depots across the region.