Red Grooms
American, b. 1937

Saskia Down the Metro/Subway Riders. 1983.
Color silkscreen with relief.
Signed and dated, lower right, and inscribed AP 7/25, lower left.
Image size: 23 ½” × 30 1/8.”
Artist proof outside the edition of 250 impressions. From the portfolio New York, New York, published by the New York Graphic Society, Ltd., Greenwich, Connecticut, 1983.
Purchased with funding from the State of New York. Percent for Art Program, 2001.

Located on the 8th Floor of the Newman Vertical Campus.

With its frenetic energy and vivid, comical caricatures, Saskia Down the Metro bears the hallmarks of Red Grooms’ distinctive Pop Art artistic sensibility. Here we see a claustrophobic interior of a packed New York City subway car. Grooms’ daughter Saskia stands at the center of the composition, eyes peering out from behind the center pole. Her grip is tight, in sharp contrast to the adults around her, who casually clasp the pole or the straps along the length of the car with one hand, holding newspapers, pocketbooks, or even a dog, with the other. Sharply drawn and loosely drawn characters dressed in brightly colored patterns of stripes, plaids and dots converge, each individual’s personality as recognizable as if it were a portrait, all portrayed in vivid technicolor: a mohawk-ed man in green glasses stands over a plump, gray haired lady sporting a red and gray checkered suit; a blond, dark-skinned woman in a houndstooth-patterned jacket stretches an impossibly long arm to reach above Saskia’s head, open-handed so as not to mar her elegantly manicured red fingernails. Like much of Grooms’ work, humorous and quirky details emerge with close viewing. While the work is extremely fresh and relatable to a contemporary audience, it’s also a time capsule of the 1980’s, a portal into New York City past: notice the straps that line the length of the subway car, whose use coined the term “straphanger”; see the tags that adorn the sides and ceiling of the car, a reminder of the New York City Transit Authority’s declared a war on graffiti just a year later; take stock of these subway riders, vigilant and engaged in the world around them, unlike today’s riders, who mostly stare down at their phones to pass the time, disengaged from their fellow passengers.

The sentiment behind the exhibition title “Wish You Were Here” is a longing for a shared experience of time and place, made more poignant by the current Covid-19 pandemic and our experiences of quarantine, particularly for those of us living in New York City, once the epicenter of the outbreak. With social distancing protocols still in place in the Summer of 2020, I marvel at this recently lived memory (and cringe at the thought) of standing cheek to jowl, as Saskia does in the image, with my fellow New Yorkers once again. What used to be mere annoyance, now elicits concern and fear. Saskia Down the Metro makes me feel oddly nostalgic for life in New York City as we knew it just six months ago.

 Written by Fay Duftler, graduate student in the Arts Administration Program at Baruch College.