Seventy-eight new glass panels now wrap around the elevators at the Mosholu Parkway subway station, the last public artwork designed by Bronx artist Corinne Grondahl before she died in 2024 while the project was still underway. MTA Arts & Design announced the completion of the installation on August 31, expanding on Grondahl's original 2008 commission at the same elevated 4 train stop on the border of Bedford Park and Norwood.
The two new works, titled The Gyre/CHAOS and CHANGE, explore environmental destruction and renewal in New York's waterways, according to Bronx Times. On the station's southbound side, The Gyre/CHAOS depicts the North Pacific Gyre and the plastic waste that can enter New York's waterways, while CHANGE, on the northbound side, represents the ongoing renewal of polluted waters and reflects the revitalization of the Bronx River. The panels now surround the elevators on the station's platforms and mezzanines, installed as part of the same accessibility improvements that made Mosholu Parkway fully ADA-accessible.
An Elevator Project That Made Room for Art
The MTA opened two new elevators at Mosholu Parkway in September 2025, ahead of schedule and under budget, finally making the elevated station accessible for the first time, according to the MTA. That elevator work was part of a broader $692 million accessibility megaproject. The Mosholu Parkway overhaul was executed under a Public-Private Partnership delivery model that the MTA Board approved in December 2022, bundling accessibility upgrades across eight subway stations, per the same agency.
The station serves more than 4,000 daily commuters and connects riders to major local institutions, including Montefiore Medical Center, per the same agency's account of the project's scale. The new glass panels now ring the elevators installed under that same effort, giving Grondahl's expanded artwork a physical home that didn't exist when she first designed the station's windscreens nearly two decades earlier.
Building on a 2008 Original
Grondahl's original 2008 installation, Metromorphosis/Birth of a Station, consisted of 14 fused-glass windscreen panels designed as a metaphor linking the New York City subway network to the human vascular system, according to Lehman College. That earlier work also drew inspiration from the Algonquin translation of Mosholu, meaning smooth or small stones, a reference to how local river currents rounded rough rocks over time. The word originally referred to a local creek running through the Bronx, per the same source.
Tina Vaz said Grondahl connected with people through color and motion, and that expanding the installation lets that feeling reach more riders, according to Bronx Times. Vaz added that Grondahl's presence in the station is now more inviting, and that her expanded work reminds New Yorkers of her generosity.
From Necktie Paintings to Beach Debris
Corinne Grondahl was a Bronx-based textile artist known for transforming discarded silk neckties into tie paintings, incorporating recycled and repurposed materials throughout her work, per Bronx Times. Her Water Warriors series, inspired by her life on the water in the Bronx, included materials collected from the beach. Grondahl and her son Chris made weekly trips to a Goodwill store in New Jersey, where she once purchased several bags of donated clothing tied together with silk neckties for $1 each.
Chris said his mother repurposed those neckties and used their texture, patterns and colors as brush strokes, and that the tie paintings reflected how she found use and beauty in everything, according to the outlet's report. Grondahl exhibited work at Hostos Community College and Lehman College, and received a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe and the Michigan Arts Council, as well as a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. Before her death, she also held solo exhibitions, including Natural Phenomenon in 2018 and Nothing Lasts Forever in 2016, at the Andrew Freedman Home on Grand Concourse, according to MTA Arts & Design.
Craft and Legal Framework Behind the Panels
The 78 glass panels were fabricated by Franz Mayer of Munich, a 170-year-old German artisan firm that has produced major public transit art across New York City, including subway installations by Faith Ringgold, Katherine Bradford and Ann Hamilton, according to Forecast Public Art. Traher Design provided design support for the panels, per Bronx Times.
The commission itself exists because of New York's 1982 Percent for Art legislation, which set the stage for MTA Arts & Design's founding in 1985 and requires that 1% of eligible capital construction budgets go toward permanent public art, according to The New York Public Library. That policy has produced hundreds of permanent transit art installations across the system, including an earlier MTA Arts & Design piece called Harlem Melodic Moments that accompanied Park Avenue viaduct repairs.
The Bronx River's Own Comeback
Grondahl's CHANGE panel honors real environmental progress happening a few miles from the station. In June, the Wildlife Conservation Society documented the first wild river otter along the Bronx River in roughly 100 years, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. River otters require clean water and native fish habitats to survive, making their return concrete evidence of the kind of renewal Grondahl's artwork depicts.
Her other panel, The Gyre/CHAOS, points to a starker warning: the North Pacific Gyre, a massive rotating ocean current system where millions of tons of plastic waste accumulate into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to MTA Arts & Design. Ocean gyres trap synthetic microplastics carried through connected urban waterways, tying the global crisis back to the same rivers running through the Bronx.
A photo of the finished installation was taken by Nicholas Knight, per Bronx Times. The panels now stand as Grondahl's final public statement, expanding a nearly two-decade-old commission into a permanent tribute to her life, her materials and the waterways she spent years documenting before her death.
