Two horizontal panels of photographs, with blue upholstery and wood seating below the panels. The two photographs depict reenactments of significant but little-known...

Stan Douglas Penn Station’s Half Century

Moynihan Train Hall

On Permanent View

About the Exhibition

From 1910 to 1963 the original Pennsylvania Station stood one block east of Moynihan Train Hall, on the footprint of today’s Madison Square Garden. The demolition of the grand, Beaux Arts building, designed by eminent American architects McKim, Mead & White, is now considered an incomparable loss to the history of Gilded Age architecture and to the urban landscape of New York City. In the Ticketed Waiting Room at Moynihan Train Hall, artist Stan Douglas’ nine photographic panels, arranged in three pairs and one triptych, reconstruct significant but little-known moments spanning the Station’s half-century lifespan, standing as vivid evocations of the city’s forgotten history. In order to re-create both the demolished building and these moments, Douglas undertook extensive archival research. Extrapolating from photographs, newspaper articles, and architectural plans, he restaged historical events by posing and photographing live performers in period costume. Douglas stitched together dozens of exposures to create each tableau, which he then set within exactingly rendered CGI (computer-generated imagery) backgrounds that faithfully reproduce the soaring ceilings and stately concourses of the original Station. Douglas selected events that chronicle the breadth of collective experience for which Penn Station served as a stage. With a cinematic quality, each scene revives history in uncanny detail, revealing this architectural landmark as a grand theater for the millions of human dramas that animate civic spaces and endow them with meaning.

Since the late 1980s, Douglas has used photography, film, and theater to reconsider history and the means of its documentation, which define its shape in our collective memory. Born of exhaustive historical research, Douglas’ artworks bring new focus to overlooked events specific to a particular location. He frequently hones in on intimate, localized moments of spectacle and poignancy that speak to broader societal shifts. In restaging these events, Douglas consciously references the technologies he employs to bring them to life. In Penn Station’s Half Century, depictions of vaudeville performers, Hollywood set designs, and photo mural ad campaigns echo Douglas’s own artistic process, suggesting that photographic documentation has the potential to be a medium of fantasy as much as one of verisimilitude. Conceived specifically for the series of four architectural niches that anchor the rear wall of the Ticketed Waiting Room, the nine individual scenes are connected by multiple narrative threads and introduce subtle details that reveal themselves upon close examination. Penn Station’s Half Century is the artist’s first permanent public commission in the United States.

Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver, Canada; lives and works in Vancouver)
Penn Station’s Half Century, 2020
Ceramic ink on glass
Nine photographic panels installed in four niches: each niche 6′ 7 5/8” H x 22′ 2 ½” W x ½” D
Commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund

Installation Photos

A wall of a train lobby houses two horizontal panels of photographs, with blue upholstery and wood seating below the panels. The two photographs depict reenactments...

About the Artist

Stan Douglas View Profile

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver, Canada) has used photography, film, and theater to reconsider history and the means of its documentation, which define its shape in our collective memory. Born of exhaustive historical research, Douglas’ artworks bring new focus to overlooked events specific to a particular location. He frequently hones in on intimate, localized moments of spectacle and poignancy that speak to broader societal shifts. In restaging these events, Douglas consciously references the technologies he employs to bring them to life.

Douglas’ work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions such as the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N (2025); DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Germany (2022); Phi Foundation, Montreal (2022); Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (2022); Toledo Museum of Art, OH (2021); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2016); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria (2016); Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden (2016); and WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2015). His work has been featured in the Venice Biennale (2022, 2019, 2005, 2001, 1990) and in documenta (2002, 1997, 1992). Douglas has received many awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). Work by the artist is held in collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Tate, London; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.

(as of 2025)

Artworks

Photo depicting an impromptu vaudeville show in the waiting room of the historical Penn Station building.

People dressed in winter fashions from the 1920s gather around the stairs to observe and photograph the emergence of an arrested woman.

A trimotor airplane rests in the dimly lit, empty waiting room of a grand station. Sun pours into the waiting room as passengers begin to trickle into the space.

Six massive black and white photo murals within a grand train stationdepict railroad employees: a conductor, engineer, soldier, and many more.

A depiction of a modern ticket and service bureau in a grand train station, with a glowing roof cover that resembles a clam shell.

An image depicts final moments of affection as soldiers leaving for World War II bid farewell to loved ones in a grand train station.

A vacant soundstage from a 1945 film set in a grand train hall populated only by technicians, props, and lighting instruments.

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.

Stan Douglas has mined the history of the original Penn Station, giving heroic pictorial life to narratives from different moments in time using today’s most advanced digital technologies.