Six artists set to take over London Underground in 2024

Transport for London (TfL) has announced six artists that will be part of next year’s Art on the Underground programme.

Art on the Underground will continue its annual tradition of working with contemporary artists to consider the history of art on the transport network and the collective experience of travel, into 2024.

The programme’s major commissions for next year include British artist Claudette Johnson, who will create a new mural artwork at Brixton station in November 2024.

Ms Johnson is a founding member of the 1980s BLK Art Group in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, which was created to challenge harmful stereotypes of representation. Her work aims to give space and power to the presence of black women and men and an understanding of shared humanity.

Also featured in the programme is British artist Rita Keegan, who co-founded the former Brixton Art Gallery, in Atlantic Road, Brixton, in 1983 and established the Women Artists of Colour Index (WOCI) in 1985.

She will develop a new commission exploring the history of moquette design for the pocket Tube Map in August.

Ms Keegan’s project will explore memory, history, dress and textiles, with the new Tube map cover to look into the London Underground’s archive of Tube seat fabrics.

Artist duo, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings are set to create a permanent mosaic work at St James’s Park station in October 2024.

Ms Quinlan and Ms Hastings’s artwork for St James’s Park will consider a period of political nostalgia, in Westminster – where the future is debated – and the Royal palaces, where the past is preserved.

A series of artworks at Heathrow Terminal four Underground station will be installed in June, created by British artist and photographer Joy Gregory, focussing on themes of migration.

Finally, London and Beirut-based artist Joe Namy will create a new sound work with the Mayor of London’s culture and community spaces at risk programme, bringing a new audio work to the London Underground network in July.

The announcement comes as TfL releases new figures that show numbers of London’s Tube commuters are almost reaching pre-pandemic levels.

Tube ridership is now at around 88 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with around 24.4 million journeys made each week.

On Thursdays, ridership levels are now reaching about four million, for the first time since the pandemic.

Eleanor Pinfield, head of art on the Underground at TfL, said: “The commissions ask us to reflect again on our histories; on whose voices are foregrounded and whose are overlooked and raises questions on how we might interrogate that history today.”

Pictured top: Artwork by Rita Keegan who co-founded the former Brixton Art Gallery in 1983 (Picture: Rita Keegan)