For L.A.’s newest underground art experience, head down to the Metro Regional Connector

Photographer Clarence Williams’ “Migrations” also flanks the tracks at the Historic Broadway Station. The piece is a black-and-white photo essay, transferred to panels of porcelain enamel steel, addressing Black migration and migration to Los Angeles. One wall displays his images from New Orleans shortly before and after Hurricane Katrina. Williams, a former Los Angeles Times journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1998, shot the images after winning an Open Society Foundations fellowship and some of the pictures ran in the Miami Herald.

One photo depicts a narrow boat floating down a flooded street; another shows a despondent-looking, shirtless man bicycling along a wrecked residential street, a weathered American flag whipping in the foreground.

“As a result of the hurricane, there was this migration of Black folks throughout the United States, including to Los Angeles,” Williams says, gesturing to the work.

Clarence Williams’ “Migrations,” a collection of photographs paired with haikus by Ursula Rucker at the Historic Broadway Station. The work speaks to Black migration and migration to Los Angeles.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

His photographs on the other side of the platform depict L.A. residents of different ethnicities that have migrated to the city. There’s an elder Armenian woman, a Korean Jewish baby, a Somalian American student. All of Williams’ images are paired with haiku poems his close childhood friend, the poet and spoken word recording artist Ursula Rucker, wrote for the piece. Beside the floating New Orleans boat, it reads:

“gonna trouble the
water make it rise, angry,
til it leaves its mark”

One picture notably approaches the essay’s narrative differently: It’s of Williams’ parents, a year before Hurricane Katrina. “The reason why I included it within the idea of migration is because that’s the day my father passed away,” Williams says, his voice heavy with emotion.

Suddenly a safety message blares from an overhead speaker: “The train is arriving. Please stand back on the platform.” A subway car rolls in, largely obscuring Williams’ work. But the burst of movement, as the train car cuts through the tunnel, somehow animates the photo essay, punctuating its ideas about migration to a city that, as Williams puts it, is “the quintessential place for new beginnings.”

Upstairs, Mark Steven Greenfield’s “Red Car Requiem” mural nearly runs the length of the station concourse. It’s a 148-foot-long glass mosaic piece that took the artist about six years to make. The abstract design, an explosion of red, yellow and orange tones, is an ode to the Pacific Electric Railway Co.’s electric streetcar system — the “red cars” — which debuted in L.A. in 1901, shut down in 1961 and which played an integral role in the development of neighborhoods along its routes.

Mark Steven Greenfield with his glass mosaic, “Red Car Requiem,” at the new Historic Broadway Station.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The piece — a series of geometric clusters that the artist describes as “rosettes” and which are linked by kinetic, ribbon-like threads — at first glance looks like a subway map itself. Public transit on the red cars directly informed the piece. In his research, Greenfield spoke to older people with memories of riding the red cars and the circular forms in the rosette clusters are the shape of actual red car ticket punches from his research.

Seeing the work fully installed on-site, Greenfield says he feels “overwhelmed.”

A detail of Mark Steven Greenfield’s “Red Car Requiem,” an ode to the Pacific Electric Railway Co.’s electric streetcar system.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“I was trying to find something that related to the expansion of Los Angeles,” he says. “And if you get into the history of the Pacific Electric, had it not been for that, L.A. wouldn’t have been the sprawl that it is. Because it made different parts of the county accessible.”

Greenfield also appears somewhat astounded that the piece is finally done — and at how well it came out. In designing the work, he painted an exact version at quarter scale, so 2 feet by 37 feet. A fabricator in Mexico translated it to glass mosaic. The painting was done on Dura-Lar (polyester film), he says, and with acrylic ink, “it handles much like watercolor, so you get these subtle gradations. I’m amazed that the fabricators could replicate that effect.”

Ralph Gilbert’s light box installation, “Performance on the Streets of LA.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Nearby, on an intermediate landing, Ralph Gilbert’s “Performance on the Streets of LA” fills five light boxes. His images began as paintings of street performers in various locations — along Hollywood Boulevard, Olvera Street/Union Station, at Echo Park Lake, Pershing Square and the Venice Boardwalk — before being digitally transferred to the light boxes. The imagery bleeds from one panel to the next, providing a sense of connectivity. And the bold, primary colors in the works — cobalt blue, lemon yellow, scarlet red — brighten an otherwise benign, utilitarian space connecting staircases.

“My goal with these works,” Gilbert said in a Metro statement, “was to create images that Metro commuters would recognize and relate to as their own world, familiar on the one hand, yet also fresh, as represented by a painter whose character was informed by the city we share.”

On the plaza level by the station’s entrance is Andrea Bowers’ double-sided text piece on transparent glass. It’s called “The People United (‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,’ Sergio Ortega and Quilapayun; ‘Brown Beret 13 Point Political Program,’ La Causa).”

“One of the big technical challenges,” Yamamoto says, “was how to make it readable from both [directions] and not feel like you’re on the wrong side of it.”

Andrea Bowers’ text installation instills messages of unity and democracy in the glass walls of the Historic Boradway Station’s entrance pavilion.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

No matter. The graphic and bold text, readable or not, makes a collective point. The station is located directly below the former Los Angeles Times building, in an area thick with civic institutions: City Hall, the Hall of Justice and the U.S. Courthouse, among them. The piece — featuring slogans “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (the people united will never be defeated) and “By independence we mean the right to self-determination, self-government and freedom” — conveys the importance of democracy and freedom of expression.

“I seek to reflect the diverse communities,” Bowers said in a statement, “that regularly gather downtown to express their voices and their rights.”

One of two murals by Mungo Thomson, on the platform at the Grand Ave. Arts/Bunker Hill Station. The piece connects deep tunneling and outer space with reassembled images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)