The dance etched onto the glass of New York train station.

On Friday, September 10th, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's MTA Arts & Design program officially launched "Every One," one of three pieces in a mosaic art project by artist Nick Cave. The other two pieces—"Each One" at the space shuttle entrance and "Equal All" on the central station wall—will be installed next year. The $1.8 million project, funded by MTA Arts & Design, is part of a larger project to redesign and reconfigure the Space Shuttle Route 42, costing over $250 million.

American sculptor, dancer, and performance artist Nick Cave – the creator of the mosaic series Every One – first gained public attention through his Soundsuits performances in September 2010. Soundsuits, meaning "sound costumes," are so named because of the sounds they produce when the wearer moves. These are garments commonly used in traditional religious ceremonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Haiti, but Cave has given them a unique twist using materials such as branches, metal wires, coarse fabric, and even human hair. Nick Cave is also no stranger to performing art at train stations across the United States. In early April 2013, he staged a performance featuring 30 dancers wearing horse-like Soundsuits in the Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Terminal.

Looking at his works, it's immediately clear that Cave has a very diverse cultural and artistic background. Issues related to beliefs, rituals, culture, and fashion are an important and ever-present part of his work. With Soundsuits, he believes they help people become anonymous, faceless, escaping the constraints of politics, religion, race, or gender, entering the realm of dreams and the bizarre. And with Every One, Cave no longer uses real people to perform Soundsuits; instead, he transforms them into dances etched onto glass, with images of dancers in costumes dancing along the wall.

In an interview at the studio in Chicago, Cave shared, "It's almost like watching a film. As you move step by step, from left to right, you see them moving."

Since being chosen as the performance artist for the subway project in February 2018, Nick Cave had been wondering: How could a constantly moving Soundsuit become a static mosaic on the wall? And he breathed a sigh of relief when he found the answer: continuity.

When Cave arrived in New York to see the Every One project in early August, he said, "I felt like I was in the middle of the performance, watching up close and feeling like it was made just for me. It was a feeling that was both hurried and unique, as each movement of the painting and the seamlessness of the glass resonated with each other."

He added, "The important thing is that we can use art to evoke other things, to connect with something. For example, in a mosaic on this hallway, there's a pair of sneakers. And that detail brings the artwork to this city; it's present here, right now."

From beneath the pink raffia cloak, meticulously hand-embellished with pieces of glass, a pair of modern sneakers in salmon red, white, and chestnut brown are revealed. Cave appreciates the visual art on display here: the images are sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract. "Sometimes you recognize it, sometimes you don't," he says, "But that's the beauty of this work."

Cave created the mosaics based on photographs of Soundsuits being showcased by photographer James Prinz, and inlaid them onto glass. After completing the design for Everyone in early 2020, he selected the Franz Mayer of Munich Stained Glass Design and Manufacturing Company from a list provided by MTA Arts & Design, and together, they transformed a drawing on paper into colorful mosaic artworks.

Michael Mayer, CEO of Franz Mayer of Munich, exclaimed, "These artists, they are magical."

And the craftsmen printed the blueprints to scale, placed them on a table, and got to work. Cave's mosaic is created using a real-life photo collage method, meaning the glass pieces are embedded directly onto the mesh backing, rather than creating inverted reflections like images in a mirror. "Which stone will be embedded next, to create a unique dance?" Michael said when talking about the process. His team cut the glass pieces into smaller pieces, attached them to the mesh lining underneath, and then gradually embedded them onto the wall. The finished work measures approximately 43.5 meters on one wall and 54.5 meters on the other, with 11 digital screens in the middle. Every 15 minutes, these screens play videos of dancers performing in Soundsuits.

Although this was Nick Cave's first time creating a mosaic, he was eager to have the opportunity to use this style again. Cave said, "I'm thinking about creating a mosaic sculpture, not just something mounted on a wall, but something that exists three-dimensionally in space, and you can walk around and admire it. Yes, I've been thinking about this the moment I walked down that hallway."

Sandra Bloodworth, longtime director of MTA Arts & Design, shared in an interview at Bryant Park, "Cave is an artist who is very connected to the community and also connects with people's emotions. And as we return to normal life, things start to fall back on track and the city revives, we get to admire the work of such an artist—this is the perfect time."

Cave says that Everyone is a work about movement. The glass dancers in Soundsuits made of raffia and fur reflect the bustling life of the more than 100,000 people who boarded the Route 42 shuttle train every day before the pandemic – that's as many as 10,000 people showing up every hour to board the train.

On that last day of August, the movement of the mosaic on the wall seemed to synchronize with the actual movement taking place in the hallway: a man in a helmet was wielding a waterjet cutter, cutting through the stone slab; another was carefully polishing a newly completed mosaic with glass cleaner and a metal scouring pad. Sweat dripped down, and the workers busily toiled around, continuing to apply new mosaics to the wall.

"We're not just spectators," Cave said, "We're also a part of the performance."

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