A crop of black and white lit up high-rise buildings descending from the ceiling of the inside of a train station, with three arched windows.

Elmgreen & Dragset The Hive

Moynihan Train Hall

On Permanent View

About the Exhibition

Suspended from the ceiling of the 31st Street Mid-block Entrance Hall, The Hive is a 1:100 scaled architectural model that offers a surreal and fantastical vision of a global metropolis. Dozens of illuminated high-rise buildings descend toward visitors, their downturned orientation inviting new and varied perspectives as visitors move around the space. Artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset has combined miniaturized skyscrapers of their own invention with iconic high-rise buildings from megacities around the world, distilling these towers into their most essential forms. This fictional city combines landmarks from Chicago, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, London, and Paris as well as iconic New York City silhouettes.

Titling the work The Hive, the artists suggest a link between natural and human-built structures, like the complex and evolving architecture of a beehive. They have also compared the ceiling-mounted buildings to luminous stalactites that pay tribute to the highly developed cities we live in today while reminding us of our cave-dweller origins. Familiar yet foreign, this uncanny, hybridized representation of an urban center highlights the globalization of architectural design and evokes the influence and interconnectedness of the world’s great cities. Like an inverted reflection of the cityscape just beyond the Train Hall doors, The Hive expresses the quintessential idea of New York City as a melting pot where cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities coexist to become greater than the sum of their parts.

Since 1995, Elmgreen & Dragset have created sculptures and installations that encourage novel perspectives on the structures and systems that govern our lives. Their works transpose and relocate everyday objects into unexpected arrangements and settings, often with subversive humor. Through recontextualizations of the familiar, the artists transform the quotidian fixtures of our lived environment—ATM machines, sewage pipes, suburban swimming pools—inviting new narratives and activating associations with broader societal tensions. Elmgreen & Dragset’s strategy of displacement fundamentally shifts our perception of our surroundings and often resists notions of conformity within our built and sociocultural environments. In keeping with their practice and in visual dialogue with the artists’ works Magic Mushrooms (2015) and City In The Sky (2019), The Hive allows us a surprising perceptual and spatial relationship to a familiar view, the city skyline. The looming stature of the inverted skyscrapers is at once overpowering and enthralling. It evokes the magnetic draw of cities and the continual urbanization of our world. With buildings up to 9 feet tall and integrating over 0.8 miles (1.3 km) of LED strip, this is one of their most technically complex installations. The Hive is the artists’ first permanent public sculpture in New York.

Elmgreen & Dragset
Michael Elmgreen (b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; lives and works in Berlin, Germany), Ingar Dragset (b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway; lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
The Hive, 2020
Stainless steel, aluminum, polycarbonate, LED lights, and lacquer
45’ 5” L x 22’ 5” W x 12’ D
Commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund

Installation Photos

A crop of black and white lit up high-rise buildings descending from the ceiling of the interior of a train station. People walk around underneath the work.

An exterior of a train station with three large arched windows and doors, with the artwork peeking through the window.

A close-up shot of a crop of black and white lit up high-rise buildings descending from the ceiling.

A crop of black and white lit up high-rise buildings descending from the ceiling of the interior of a train station.

About the Artist

Elmgreen & Dragset View Profile

Elmgreen & Dragset have presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2024–25); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, (2019–20); The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018–19); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2016); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); and ZKM Museum of Modern Art, Karlsruhe (2010). Their work has been included in the NGV Triennial, Melbourne, Australia (2023); Bangkok biennial (2018), Istanbul biennial (2013, 2011, 2001), Liverpool biennial (2012), Singapore biennial (2011), Moscow biennial (2011, 2007), Venice biennial (2009, 2003), Gwangju biennial (2006, 2002), São Paulo biennial (2002), and Berlin biennial (1998). In 2012 Elmgreen & Dragset were selected for London’s Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square. Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Elmgreen & Dragset live and work in Berlin.

(as of 2020)

portrait of the artists Elmgreen & Dragset

About Creative Partnerships and Moynihan Train Hall

Extending our core mission to present dynamic exhibitions by the world’s most compelling artists and make culture accessible to all, Public Art Fund: Creative Partnerships brings strategic planning, curatorial, project management, and communications expertise to leading cultural institutions, corporations, and civic organizations across the globe. Through these collaborations, Public Art Fund commissions permanent installations and temporary exhibitions in line with the unique vision of our partners and the specific parameters of each site, resulting in new artworks that activate public spaces, create engaged constituencies, and amplify the impact of our partners’ own initiatives through the power of public art.

Public Art Fund was invited by Empire State Development to develop and direct a program of ambitious art installations for three prominent sites within the Train Hall. In keeping with the redesigned building’s architectural integration of old and new, the art program commissioned three of the world’s leading artists to create large-scale, site-specific artworks that reflect broadly on notions of past, present, and future. These very different commissions, by Stan Douglas, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Kehinde Wiley, demonstrate each artist’s ingenuity and vision.

Elmgreen & Dragset have dreamed an imaginary global metropolis into sculptural being, upside down, radiating the city’s irresistible urban energy.