WE OWN THE NIGHT

Night after night for over a year starting in 2009, the curators Workhorse and PAC literally took street art underground by inviting the world’s leading street artists into an abandoned New York City subway station to create original artwork. The space had been abandoned for eighty years and, as PAC notes, they knew no one had been there at all, “because there was no graffiti.” Instead of a grand opening to celebrate the world’s largest underground gallery, the station was boarded up in mid-2010 when the work was completed. In the new book We Own the Night, one hundred artists and their works are documented in over two hundred images exploring the space and the process of the Underbelly project. The gallery’s location remains a secret kept by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, making it a time capsule for future generations.

We Own the Night: The Art of the Underbelly Project is out Tuesday from Rizzoli.

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