PIONEERS OF THE ART WORLD
In the centenary year of women’s suffrage, London’s Tube network has become a powerful platform for female artists
UNDERGROUND SCENE A network of female creatives adorn London’s Tube with bold artworks
‘Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but… it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends,’ wrote Maya Angelou. This inclusive philosophy is shared by the curators of Art on the Underground, which this year is celebrating women artists in honour of the centenary of female suffrage. From Heather Phillipson’s giant fried eggs springing up on the disused platform at Gloucester Road station to the Romanian artist Geta Bratescu’s vivid pink triangles adorning the Tube map, Underground passengers are invited on a journey through contemporary art that takes in an array of practices.
‘The opportunity to look at power structures throughout the city, and through a gendered lens, seemed too good to miss,’ says Eleanor Pinfield, the head of Art on the Underground, who has commissioned a series of women to create pieces especially for the anniversary year. The latest contributors are the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akun-yili Crosby, whose mural-inspired work Remain, Thriving took over the billboard space at Brixton station in September, and the photographer and musician Linder Sterling (known professionally as Linder), who will unveil an 85-metre-long photomontage, accompanied by posters, a Tube-map design and a spectacular performance, at Southwark station on 9 November.
Despite their contrasting backgrounds – Akunyili Crosby is based in California, having travelled from Nigeria to the US aged 16, whereas Sterling was brought up in a working-class family in Liverpool – the two artists share a fascination with the untold histories of minority groups. Akunyili Crosby uses the traditions of Western figurative art as the basis for her domestic scenes but introduces African motifs, layered on using a photo-transfer technique, as a way of expressing her dual-cultural identity. ‘Part of my motivation to become an artist was this desire to create images that reveal the multiple worlds that immigrants and their descendants simultaneously straddle,’ she explains. She acknowledges her debt to the women of the diaspora who have blazed a trail in infiltrating the closed circle of Western art. ‘Artists such as Wangechi Mutu not only made me more ambitious in my goals but also opened up art as something where I was represented and included as a viewer,’ she says. ‘They were the pace setters.’
Personal narratives are at the heart of her Art on the Underground commission, which has been shaped by conversations with local residents. ‘This work is for people who grew up in Brixton,’ she says. ‘I wanted to make the area’s energy and stories, past and present, visible.’ With its vibrant depiction of interracial, intergenerational groups, it celebrates the neighbourhood’s multicultural community, as well as being appropriate for its location – a liminal space that is neither at street level nor fully subterranean. Akunyili Crosby compares this to the post-colonial concept of a ‘contact zone, which is the space where cultures come into contact and grapple with each other’.
Sterling’s work is similarly influenced by its unique Underground setting, Southwark station being especially magical because it is home to the glass artist Alexander
Beleschenko’s blue-panelled wall. When Sterling discovered that Beleschenko had taken inspiration from a set design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, she decided to pay tribute by staging an opening performance that reinterprets the arrival of the Queen of the Night for a contemporary audience, with multiple costumed queens singing their very own Mozartian ‘rage arias’. Taking place below ground, the event harks back to a time when, she says, ‘the British “underground” was a place of opposition and heightened creativity’ – a site of resistance that is as much a mindset as a physical location.
Sterling herself was a central figure in the 1970s underground scene, combining pornographic imagery with everyday objects in collage-style artworks designed to combat the objectification of women. Her Southwark billboard may not have quite the shock factor of her dildo-brandishing, meatdress-wearing days (a stunt she pulled decades before Lady Gaga), but it does continue the conversation about women’s rights. Titled The Bower of Bliss, a Victorian slang term for female genitalia, the work will turn the station into a metaphorical sanctuary. ‘When women feel frightened, they often head for the Tube – you know you’ll get help there,’ she says. ‘I like the idea of having a space that’s all to do with female pleasure in the midst of an industrial landscape.’ To populate her ‘bower’, Sterling has delved into the Transport for London archives in search of hidden female narratives, building up a large-scale collage that includes images of 1940s night workers and 1950s adverts encouraging young women to become conductors.
There are political undertones to both artists’ work: Sterling will update her billboards seasonally in response to the changing socioeconomic backdrop, while Akunyili Crosby’s portrayal of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Windrush generation sets the piece within the context of recent immigration scandals. She highlights the value of bringing art to public spaces that are visited by millions: ‘I think it’s wrong to assume someone who doesn’t go to a gallery won’t appreciate or understand what has been represented and decode it.’ Sterling, for her part, emphasises that there is no single message concealed within her art. ‘I don’t even have the bare bones of a story when I start, but the beauty of the cut-out process is that you get these accidental juxtapositions and a narrative will arise,’ she says. She hopes, however, that viewers will draw their own conclusions: ‘The worst thing would be if nobody had anything to say.’
That seems an unlikely outcome: staff and passengers have been quick to offer feedback on the commissions to date, according to Eleanor Pinfield. ‘What’s interesting is the mass engagement,’ she observes. ‘People feel allowed to comment on work because of the space it’s in.’ This democratising power is precisely the reason why authentic public art matters – it’s a train everyone can board.
Art on the Underground (www.art.tfl.gov.uk).