Travel under the streets of London with this lavishly illustrated exploration of abandoned, modified, and reused Underground tunnels, stations, and architecture.

Initiated in 1985, the MTA Arts & Design collection of public art now encompasses more than 250 projects, creating a dynamic underground museum of contemporary art that spans the entire city and its immediate environs. Since the program was founded, a diverse group of artists—including Elizabeth Murray, Faith Ringgold, Eric Fischl, Romare Bearden, Acconci Studio, and many others—has created works in mosaic, terra-cotta, bronze, and glass for the stations of the New York City Subways and Buses, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road, and Bridges and Tunnels. An update of the classic Along the Way, this expanded edition features nearly 100 new works installed in stations since 2006, including Sol LeWitt’s Whirls and twirls (MTA) at Columbus Circle, Doug and Mike Starn’s See it split, see it change at South Ferry, and the James Carpenter/ Grimshaw/Arup Sky Reflector-Net at Fulton Center. The book illustrates how the program has taken to heart its original mandate: that the subways be “designed, constructed, and maintained with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency.” MTA Arts & Design is committed to preserving and restoring the original ornament of the system and to commissioning new works that exemplify the principles of vibrant public art, relating directly to the places where they are located and to the community around them. The definitive guide to works commissioned by MTA Arts & Design, a reference for riders who have wondered about an artist or the meaning behind the art they’ve seen, as well as a memento for visitors, New York’s Underground Art Museum provides 300 color illustrations and insightful descriptions sure to infuse any future trip or viewing with a fresh appreciation and understanding of this historic enterprise.

A New York Times Notable Book Filled with beautiful color art, dynamic storytelling, and insightful analysis, Hillary Chute reveals what makes one of the most critically acclaimed and popular art forms so unique and appealing, and how it got that way. “In her wonderful book, Hillary Chute suggests that we’re in a blooming, expanding era of the art… Chute’s often lovely, sensitive discussions of individual expression in independent comics seem so right and true.” — New York Times Book Review Over the past century, fans have elevated comics from the back pages of newspapers into one of our most celebrated forms of culture, from Fun Home, the Tony Award–winning musical based on Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic memoir, to the dozens of superhero films that are annual blockbusters worldwide. What is the essence of comics’ appeal? What does this art form do that others can’t? Whether you’ve read every comic you can get your hands on or you’re just starting your journey, Why Comics? has something for you. Author Hillary Chute chronicles comics culture, explaining underground comics (also known as “comix”) and graphic novels, analyzing their evolution, and offering fascinating portraits of the creative men and women behind them. Chute reveals why these works—a blend of concise words and striking visuals—are an extraordinarily powerful form of expression that stimulates us intellectually and emotionally. Focusing on ten major themes—disaster, superheroes, sex, the suburbs, cities, punk, illness and disability, girls, war, and queerness—Chute explains how comics get their messages across more effectively than any other form. “Why Disaster?” explores how comics are uniquely suited to convey the scale and disorientation of calamity, from Art Spiegelman’s representation of the Holocaust and 9/11 to Keiji Nakazawa’s focus on Hiroshima. “Why the Suburbs?” examines how the work of Chris Ware and Charles Burns illustrates the quiet joys and struggles of suburban existence; and “Why Punk?” delves into how comics inspire and reflect the punk movement’s DIY aesthetics—giving birth to a democratic medium increasingly embraced by some of today’s most significant artists. Featuring full-color reproductions of more than one hundred essential pages and panels, including some famous but never-before-reprinted images from comics legends, Why Comics? is an indispensable guide that offers a deep understanding of this influential art form and its masters.

In 1974, legendary Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee approached underground pioneer Denis Kitchen and offered a way for them to collaborate. Their resulting series was called Comix Book and featured work by many of the top underground cartoonists including Joel Beck, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman (first national appearance of Maus), Skip Williamson, and S. Clay Wilson. The Best of Comix Book showcases 150-pages of classic underground comix (printed on newsprint, as they originally appeared), many never before reprinted.

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.