The Museum of Transversal Art by The Information Lab

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is the entity that manages the NYC subway, one of the busiest public transportation systems in the world. An unsung, sometimes unnoticed, aspect of the subway is a massive and growing collection of public art, commissioned by the MTA.
Given its status as one of the largest collections of public art, it deserves to be known as one of New York City's many modern art museums - and thus the "Museum of Transversal Art" is born. That's what I'm calling the permanent art collection within the subway system.
Why "transversal"? Every definition of the word applies to this topic and visualization. First, the subway transverses (extends across) the city, each subway line is a transversal line (lines that intersect a system of lines), and art transverse boundaries (crosses cultural, historical, and emotional lines).

I created this visualization as part of the MTA's first Open Data Challenge & it was selected as a finalist as "most comprehensive view of the data". I wanted to give the art its due attention through making it the focus of my visualization. To create this visualization, I joined the Permanent Art Catalog to a second dataset of the MTA Subway Stations, both available on NYC's Open Data portal. This allows us to visualize where art currently lives and in some cases, is non-existent. This data visualization is both exploratory and explanatory in hopes of encouraging users to delve into the data, then visit the artwork in person, as I did to validate the data.
Most of the commissioned art uses the same materials as the subway, and to respect that idea, the bottom sections are stylistic visualizations inspired by mosaic, the dominant art style within the permanent art collection. These sections take into account the factors whether installing art in a station is feasible by examining the listed types of material and the variety of station structures of the subway system.