If you spend much time in New York, you are probably among the the six million or so who ride one of the world’s largest and oldest subway systems each day. You may have the New Yorker’s classic love-hate relationship with the system, which can take you practically anywhere for a few bucks, but is notoriously underfunded and run-down. And if so, artist Chloë Bass’s latest project may just speak to you. Literally.
If you hear something, free something is the New York native’s first sound art project, and it is the first-ever takeover by an artist of the sound system in Gotham’s labyrinthine subway complex. Waiting on selected mezzanines, riders hear a deep, attention-getting tone (designed in collaboration with artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste), followed by one of 24 announcements—though the voices may challenge the definition of that last word, as what you’ll hear isn’t always strictly informational, but rather evocative.
An audience gathered to hear a performance organized by Creative Time for Chloë Bass’s new sound project, at the Fulton Street Center. Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
Last week, in the first moments of the New York fall season, dozens of observers gathered at the massive Fulton Street Center to see a group of 10 performers, scattered throughout the atrium, deliver a performance of the texts, composed by Bass.
“What we hear changes how we feel,” says a voice in one recording. “How we feel changes what we do. And what we do changes the world around us, even if just for a moment.”
Another is a dialogue between two voices. “Remember when Aretha Franklin died and people were singing her songs together on crowded train cars?” asks one. “It was amazing. Everyone was sad, and everyone was smiling,” responds the second. “It was a moment when I wanted to say to the city, ‘You see? That’s how you are,’” says voice one, to which voice two responds, “All these little private worlds coinciding out in public.”
Each announcement—they will play in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Kreyòl, and Mandarin—is followed by the title of the project, which recalls the ubiquitous exhortation “If you see something, say something,” urging riders to protect each other from danger—or, if you like, surveil one another. Ticker displays transmit a brief explanatory text penned by the artist. Posters in the stations will also clue straphangers in to the project, but it may just be that some will hear the announcements while not seeing the posters, and go on about their day with a bit of mystery.
Sounding Off About Sound
Sound is one of the things that drive subway riders crazy, I pointed out in a phone interview with the artist. Announcements from conductors often come over the speakers in a garbled mess, and riders look around at one another, incredulous, hoping it’s not life-saving information being conveyed. Some stations are also so loud as to be potentially damaging to the human ear.
“Complaining about sound in the subway is a New Yorker’s birthright,” acknowledged Bass, who noted that generations of her family have lived here. “We’re being given information of different forms, and sometimes it’s decipherable and sometimes it’s indecipherable. But recently it’s been mostly about ways that we should make sure to keep ourselves and others safe.”
Chloë Bass. Photo: Naima Green.
“I support the idea of public safety,” she added, “but the announcements are all about monitoring your behavior and the behavior of people around you, and we already know about ways to keep safe, even without thinking about them. There are other ways to use public address to ground these forms of safety that we practice together.”
New York public art presenter Creative Time approached Bass with the same question it poses to the artists it solicits: What’s your dream public project? Having created a mosaic that combines found photographic imagery and her poetic texts at a Brooklyn subway stop in 2023, the artist was already thinking about the subways, and jumped at the chance to have the nonprofit support a project that would go wider. Over the years, Creative Time has presented numerous high-profile projects, including Tribute in Light (2002), which recreates the Twin Towers in light annually on the site where they stood, and Kara Walker’s massive sugar sphinx, A Subtlety… (2014). It also organizes a much-anticipated annual convening, the Creative Time Summit.
“If you hear something, free something engages the largest transit system in the Western Hemisphere, a place where an incredible complexity of public life unfolds,” said Creative Time curator Diya Vij in press materials. “The MTA serves millions of New York City residents daily, spanning every single neighborhood and social boundary. It is where every denomination of New York City meets. For this truly public art work, Bass offers a monumental but fleeting gesture that seeks to change the way we relate to each other in public life and public space. She asks us to consider, if we change what we hear, can we change how we feel, and in turn, will we be better neighbors?”
Public Input on Public Interventions
Bass maintains a multifarious practice; Creative Time describes her as “a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation.” The new work continues a thread that has been present in past works by the artist, which have also constituted an intervention in systems of public communication. One past project I saw dealt with visual signage; in 2020, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented her show “Wayfinding,” in a Harlem park, just as society was beginning to reopen after pandemic shutdowns. Three billboards throughout the park asked the questions: “How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention?”
A performer reads a script in a performance launching Chloë Bass’s Creative Time project If you hear something, free something (2025). Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
In addition to the Studio Museum project, Bass has had recent solo projects at upstate New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum; California African American Museum at Art + Practice, in Los Angeles; Skirball Cultural Center, also in L.A.; and the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. She also recently had her first solo commercial exhibition, “Chloë Bass: Twice Seen,” at New York gallery Alexander Gray Associates. That show was billed as “a multifaceted investigation into the nature of representation, positioning racial and cultural hybridity as foundational to American identity.”
The public was involved with If you hear something even before a sound was ever recorded. The artist conducted four preparatory focus groups, one with teenagers through East Harlem arts nonprofit Artistic Noise, one with straphangers, one with transit advocacy groups, and one with Metropolitan Transit Authority workers; all were paid for their time, but, said Bass, even those required to be there for work brought “real sentiment and thoughtfulness.”
That was encouraging, Bass said, “because this is a scary project. New Yorkers have a lot of opinions, and not everything is ideal for everyone—ever.”
If you hear something, free something is at the following subway stations through October 5, courtesy of Creative Time:
Bronx: Westchester Square (6) and 167 Street (B,D)
Queens: Court Square (7,G), 74th Street – Broadway (7), and Mets Willets Point (7)
Brooklyn: Clinton-Washington Avenues (G), Fort Hamilton Parkway Brooklyn (F,G), York Street (F), and Atlantic Avenue / Barclays Center (2,3,4,5).
Manhattan: Grand Central (S), 5th Avenue Bryant Park (7), Fulton Street (4,5), 163 Street Manhattan (A,C), and Union Square (4,5,6).
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
