Visual Journey Awaits NoHo Station’s Riders

It’s a cavernous hole in the ground near Lankershim and Chandler, almost like a giant mole burrowed deep to dig it out.

Yet there’s something decidedly retro about this excavation. The hole is covered by three giant steel arcs, forming a canopy in hues of tangerine, lemon and guacamole green--colors that were all the rage in the 1960s.

For visitors, the canopy is the first taste of the soon-to-open Metro Red Line station in North Hollywood. As visitors ride the escalators down nearly 60 feet to the train platform, they’ll pass under the first trio of giant ceramic tile murals by Los Angeles artist Ann Marie Karlsen.

Like each of the other Red Line stops, the North Hollywood subway station will do more than funnel busy commuters to their destinations. It will also serve as a de facto gallery for Karlsen’s art commissioned for the station.

Scheduled to open in midsummer, the NoHo stop is also home to Karlsen’s 11 mandala-like tile murals that convey the theme “The California Dream.”

“I hope there will be a sense of discovery every time they come,” Karlsen said of subway riders. “What appears abstract is actually a historical image.”

For a decade, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has commissioned more than 175 artists for temporary and permanent projects. MTA policy sets aside 0.5% of rail construction costs for Metro Rail public art, officials said.

Art in a utilitarian public space, such as a subway station, breaks some of the highbrow notions of artworks more typically viewed in museums and chic galleries.

“The attractiveness of public art is that it is, by definition, continuously accessible to all,” said Richard Andrews, director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and a former director of a National Endowment for the Arts program that included public art.

As visitors descend the escalator in North Hollywood, the first three kaleidoscope-like murals visually transport viewers back in time--first to North Hollywood in the 1990s with its rows of tract houses and palm trees, followed by a second mural depicting the late 1800s of Spanish ranchos and missions, and finally, a scene of Gabrielino Indians and their reverence for the earth.

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Eight other ceramic tile murals recount the San Fernando Valley’s history with references to its once-bustling citrus and peach industry (hence the citrus and avocado color scheme), Western movie stars and filmmaking and local heroes, such as aviator and Toluca Lake resident Amelia Earhart.

The murals, some 22-feet in diameter, are shaped in circles and half-circles. From a distance, Karlsen said she wanted to convey the fractured look of a kaleidoscope with abstract jewels of color and shape. Yet on closer examination, a viewer can decipher individual images: A car-clogged freeway, an old subdivision map, orange blossoms, the El Portal Theater marquee and a 1950s land shark with fins.

“My intention was they could look like fanciful designs, but up close you can have a second level of discovery,” said Karlsen, a Westchester artist who usually works on a much smaller scale.

The $308,000 commission includes just less than $50,000 for Karlsen, who spent two years on the project.

More than four tons of carefully fired tiles, encompassing about 4,000 square feet, were used in the murals. Karlsen worked closely with a team of artisans from Urban Clay of Huntington Park, which created and fired the tiles. She credits the artisans’ careful execution with accurately translating her designs, from the subtle and photo-like to the vivid and painterly.

At times, though, utility collided with aesthetics.

One mural of car-clogged freeways and Lankershim Boulevard, circa 1923, is marred by an institutional green “EXIT” sign fitted into the upper left corner. A metal emergency control panel box sits smack in the center of another colorful mural.

In one piece, Karlsen was able to revamp her design to integrate a door that was to be cut into the middle of the mural. The trompe l’oeil effect looks like a doorway into Phil’s Diner, a once-popular North Hollywood eatery.

Those kinds of intrusions into public art are not unusual in large-scale commissions, Andrews said.

During a construction walk-through of his own gallery, he saw electricians installing outlet boxes 18 inches from the floor that would have clashed with the art. He interceded and had them placed in the baseboard.

“It wasn’t that the electrician was trying to put it in the way of art, it’s just they were doing their normal job,” Andrews recalled.

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Although the project had its share of artistic compromise and heartache, Karlsen did leave behind one personal signature.

The Earhart mural includes a flight map, and near the country of Norway, which is where Karlsen’s family is from, she added a tiny word: Tor.

“That’s my son,” Karlsen said with a grin. Thousands of subway riders will pass by it, not knowing the significance. But Tor, now just a toddler, will always have a reminder of his mother’s love.

Art tours of the North Hollywood station can be arranged by calling Beverly Voran at the MTA at (213) 922-6118.For recorded information about other docent-guided Metro art tours, call (213) 922-4ART.