Laura Owens I 🍕 NY

Laura Owens’ tiled mosaic mural considers every curve, corner, and plane of the airport’s largest interior wall, transforming it into a celebration of New York City. Against a brilliant blue sky filled with illustrative clouds, Owens depicts dozens of iconic images in a motif that evokes the potential New York City conjures in the public imagination. Representing the city’s historic public artworks, treasured landmarks, popular snacks, and everyday sights, the mural also includes many symbols of the expansive transit network that connects them all. The colossal work synthesizes her unique painterly style with the artisan craft of handmade ceramic and the visual language of digital image-making. This dynamic composition changes with our point of view, as recognizable images seen from afar become gridded abstractions when seen in proximity, dissolving into impressionistic colours and out-of-focus glimpses of our imagined city.

Since the late 1990s, Owens has taken a ranging and experimental approach to the medium of painting – an approach that embraces a breadth of sources from the avant-garde to the populist to the decorative. She gained recognition by irreverently upending the medium’s history and formal conventions, appropriating and recombining techniques and motifs from the canon of fine art, folk art, pop culture, and technology. Owens’ paintings frequently challenge the boundaries between pictorial and physical space by engaging with their architectural context. In recent years, she has increasingly employed multiple media in expansive installations that explore the construction and consumption of contemporary visual culture. INY is Owens’ first tile mosaic, as well as her largest work to date. Having lived in New York at various points in her 25-year career, Owens’ iconographic tribute ranges from the widely recognizable to the artistically significant to the personally meaningful. Owens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Throughout history, extraordinary works of art have often played a key role in civic spaces that not only serve the public, but capture and express the spirit of their culture and place. That aspiration has informed the development of this series of major permanent installations for the Arrivals and Departures Hall of LaGuardia Airport Terminal B, commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund. Opened to the public by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in June 2020, Terminal B is a key feature of the most dramatic transformation of New York City’s transportation infrastructure in a generation.