Art on the CTA

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1995

As part of the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, the MCA has realized one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s multisited billboard works, “Untitled” featuring a black-and-white photograph of a lone bird soaring through a cloudy sky. Dispersed across many installation sites on the Chicago Transit Authority’s elevated rail system as well as on the MCA’s loading dock door off of Chicago Avenue, before greeting visitors outside the exhibition’s galleries on the fourth floor, Curator Carla Acevedo Yates writes that ““Untitled” might beckon us to daydream of travel, solitude, migration, or freedom.” Learn more about the artwork and each station it’s located at; the artwork is only on view for a limited time.

CTA Locations

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35th-Bronzeville-IIT (Green)
Adams/Wabash (Loop)
Belmont (Brown, Purple, Red)
Cermak-Chinatown (Red)
Cermak/McCormick Place (Green)
Chicago (Red)
Conservatory-Central Park Drive (Green)
Fullerton (Brown, Purple, Red)
Garfield (Green)
Garfield (Red)
Grand (Red)
Harold Washington Library-State/Van Buren (Loop)
Howard (Purple, Red, Yellow)
Logan Square (Blue)
Loyola (Red)
Merchandise Mart (Brown, Purple)
O’Hare (Blue)
Roosevelt (Red)
Rosemont (Blue)
Sox-35th (Red)
State/Lake (Loop)
Western (Brown)
Western (Orange)

About the Work

In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s final work, “Untitled” (1995), a lone bird soars through a cloudy sky. Haunting and poetic, the work calls into question the meaning of the bird: is it predatory or migratory; one that prefers solitude or has it lost its flock? First realized as billboards across several installation sites in mostly diverse neighborhoods in New York (as stipulated by the artist), the image, freed from the walls of art institutions and their interpretive sway, becomes part of the landscape itself, thus creating the potential for more private and unmediated encounters with the work.