20 Iconic New York City Works of Art You Might Not Guess Were Made by Columbians
The School of the Arts is inseparable from our setting in New York City. For the past 60 years, students at the School of the Arts have been shaped by the city's incomparable energy, texture, diversity, industry, and landscape. The city has left an impression on generations of students, and to celebrate the School of the Arts' 60th anniversary, we're taking a look at the impression the students have made on New York City with 20 familiar works of art you might not know were made by Columbians.
Visual Arts
The contributions of our Visual Arts grads are some of the most ubiquitous and instantly recognizable to the New Yorkers who encounter these artworks as the texture of their daily lives. These sculptures, murals and installations define the visual culture of our subways and streets, airports and arenas. You might have even passed one today.
Flying Red
Visual Arts alum Ann Gillen '69 designed this aluminum sculpture out of her Soho loft just a few years after graduating. The energetic, tomato-red form pulls against itself to reach outward and upward. It has served as a landmark outside the Midtown office tower, 909 Third Avenue, since 1987. You can also catch Gillen's public art installations on the wall of the Lincoln Center garage and in the stairwell of CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism.
Parkside Portals
Upper West Siders who commute on the C and B trains will be familiar with Parkside Portals, a mosaic on the subway platform by Visual Arts alum Joyce Kozloff '67. The sumptuous mosaic captures the essence of the neighborhood, from a bird's eye view of the park in autumn to finer gate details only a local would recognize. Kozloff plays with modern ideas of familiarity, using both the iconic tear-shaped Google Maps destination marker and naturalistic depictions of trees to span the breadth of the modern experience of New York.
Ona
Not all major artworks are huge, but Ona, a sculpture at Barclay's Center by Visual Arts alum Ursula Von Rydingsvard '75, is enormous. The bronze stalactite weighs nearly 12,000 pounds. Its organic texture contrasts with the sleek, modern entrance arch it holds up. Rydingsvard installed the sculpture, whose name means "she" in her native Polish, in 2013. The sculpture has been crucial to the fabric of downtown Brooklyn ever since.
Blueprint for a Landscape and Shorter Than the Day
Visual Arts Professor Sarah Sze has left an indelible mark across New York City. Her floating sculpture Shorter Than The Day was installed in 2022 as part of LaGuardia Airport's yearslong facelift. Named after a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, the 50-foot-tall deconstructed sphere showcases Sze's signature technique, suspension. Commuters from the 96th Street and Second Avenue Q station might also recognize Sze's subway installation Blueprint for a Landscape. Installed in 2017, the royal blue porcelain mosaic is both technical and whimsical in spirit, spanning over 14,000 square feet and colliding structural shapes with lines as soft as ripples of waves on the East River.
Ode to Tatlin
In 1991, Visual Arts alum Mary Ann Unger '75 was recruited by the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College to build a gateway to enter the school. The result is a staggering, colorful homage to the bygone Soviet masterpiece Tatlin's Tower. The tower and its audacious spirals symbolized the utopian goals of the 1917 October Revolution. While the original tower wasn't intended to last, Unger's steel Ode to Tatlin is. Unger died in 1998, but not before the sculpture cemented her legacy in the New York City landscape.
Writing
Books and poems are singular in their ability to transport readers into worlds of their own making. These novels, poems, and nonfiction books by Columbia Writing alums each capture an essence of New York City—and are by no means a comprehensive list!—and bring readers from across the country and the world into quintessential New York experiences.
Brown Girls
Olympic soccer star and queer icon Megan Rapinoe put Brown Girls, an ode to Queens by Writing alum Daphne Palasi Andreades '19, on her Literati reading list. She's not the only reader who loved Andreades' debut novel, which chronicles the lives of immigrant daughters and friends in the outer borough—The New York Times named it an Editor's Choice in 2022.
No One Left Coming to Look for You
Writing Professor Sam Lipsyte pays tribute to the punk rock scene of downtown New York in the 1990s in his novel No One Left Coming to Look for You. The caper follows Jack S., a burgeoning rock and roll star, as he wades through the junkie effluvia of the Lower East Side to find the lead singer of his band, who disappeared along with Jack's bass guitar.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful
At the heart of the New York queer scene annihilated by AIDS in the 1980s, radical art collective Gran Fury created and organized some of the most iconic protest art of the century. Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight A Pandemic by Writing alum Jack Lowery '19 tells the story of Gran Fury as they fought the AIDS crisis with art movements such as their "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster and dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
The Friend
New York City rental laws drive the plot of The Friend, a National Book Award-winning novel by Writing alum Sigrid Nunez '75. When an unnamed writer's best friend dies of suicide, she takes on his Great Dane. In order to legally keep the dog, named Apollo, in her apartment, she must smuggle him for three months without getting caught by her landlord. Rising from this screwball premise is a "penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today," according to NPR.
"Fallacies of Wonder"
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 left New York City with a multitude of scars both physical and emotional. The aftermath of the attack saw an outpouring of poetry in response to the events, including "Fallacies of Wonder" by Columbia College alum and longtime Writing professor, Richard Howard (CC '51). The poem, which The New York Times called "one of the better—if quieter—reflections on Sept 11," examines the meaning of memory and Howard's experience re-learning the outline of the city in the wake of the attack. "Often, still, I turn to look downtown," Howard writes, "from where I live on Waverly. I trust / the evidence, by daylight or by dark, / of variations in the versions of / those hundred-story towers, so neighborly / I scarcely need to look. I know that I can count / on seeing them where I remember them…I do look, though, and, where they were, / replace their being by their absences."
Everything is Now: The 1960s Avant-Garde
Film and Media Studies professor and alum J. Hoberman '81 is as downtown as it gets: he was a film and culture critic for The Village Voice for over three decades. His completist tome of New York's 1960s avant-garde, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, tells the story of the collective drama that fomented one of the most powerful cultural movements of the century.
Theatre
Nothing says New York City like a Tony Award-winning Broadway play or musical. Columbia grads have directed, produced, and worked on their fair share of these dazzling productions, and many are on the stage and ready to watch right now.
Buena Vista Social Club
Theatre alum Saheem Ali '07 developed and directs Buena Vista Social Club, a spectacular musical that tells the story of the Cuban jazz collective. The musical won Tonys in 2025 for its outstanding acting, choreography, orchestrations and sound design. Ali developed the musical with producer and 2006 T Fellow Orin Wolf. The musical is currently on stage at the Schoenfeld Theatre.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow
Discover the origins of the Mindflayer at the first Stranger Things play, The First Shadow. Executive produced by Theatre alum Thomas Swayne '20, the prequel received universal acclaim for its ambitious stage design. The First Shadow won several 2025 Tony Awards for Best Scenic Design, Best Sound Design, and Best Lighting Design, and can be experienced right now at the Marquis Theatre.
MJ: The Musical
Don't stop 'til you get enough: Columbia faculty is responsible for one of the biggest Broadway sensations of all time. Theatre Professor Lynn Nottage is the only woman to have received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice. Her smash hit MJ: The Musical follows one of the greatest pop artists of the 20th century on his Dangerous world tour. After its 2021 debut at the Neil Simon Theatre, the musical became one of the five top grossing Broadway productions of all time. The show is staged there to this day.
Hadestown
Theatre alum Rachel Chavkin '08 was honored by a street on Broadway named after her when two of her productions ran simultaneously in major theaters. Hadestown was one of them. The long running musical and interpolation of the Orpheus myth swept the 2019 Tonys, where it won the most awards of any production, including Best Musical and Best Director for Chavkin. You can watch it now at Walter Kerr Theater.
Saturday Church
Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Theatre professor James Ijames is staging his newest musical, Saturday Church, at New York Theatre Workshop through October 19, 2025. The show follows Ulysses, a New York City kid and the fiercest tenor at his aunt's church, as a chance encounter throws him into the parallel world of Saturday Church, a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ youth. Ijames co-wrote the book and lyrics with Emmy Award-winner Damon Cardasis. Saturday Church's music and lyrics are by Grammy powerhouse Sia.
Film and Television
Film and television have the power not only to connect with an enormous number of people, but these stories become part of our lives—sometimes for years or more. Movies and TV series set in New York City help shape the visual and cultural image of the city for audiences everywhere, often becoming so iconic that they shape the culture of an era.
Succession
For several years, the critically acclaimed juggernaut Succession was inescapable television, subject of countless recaps, reviews, and water cooler conversations. Its helicopters, private cars, and luxury real estate captured the shimmering spectacle of contemporary wealth in New York City. What audiences might not know is that the HBO series, loosely based on the real life drama of the Murdoch family's New York based media empire, was produced and directed by Columbia film alums. Scott Ferguson '90 executive produced seasons 2-4, and Shari Springer Berman '95 directed three episodes of the hit series. The production created a writing fellowship solely for Writing alum Brysen Boyd '20.
Only Murders in the Building
The eponymous building from Hulu's cozy caper Only Murders in the Building is only a few subway stops away from Columbia on the southbound 1 train. The show, starring Selena Gomez, Martin Short, and Steve Martin, shoots on-location in the Upper West Side and regularly features neighborhood standbys like The Pickle Diner. Columbia alums have their fingerprints all over the homegrown hit: Film alums Chris Teague '06, Shari Springer Berman '95, Cherien Dabis '04, and Jamie Babbit (BC '93) have each directed episodes, and Ben Phillippe (CC '11) has been in the writers room from the pilot.
A Complete Unknown
Bob Dylan might be from Minnesota, but New York City made the man. The biopic dramatizing Dylan's early career in New York, A Complete Unknown, stars Timothée Chalamet and was directed by Film alum James Mangold '99. The production took over blocks of Jersey City and Hoboken to fully dress the street in period appropriate design and ephemera, recreating such iconic locations as Cafe Wha? and a meticulous replica of Dylan's Greenwich apartment.
30 Rock
Tina Fey's spoof of the behind-the-scenes at SNL may have, for a time, eclipsed the source material. The parody gave Alec Baldwin what might be his most iconic role as media executive Jack Donaghy and cemented Fey as one of the comics of her generation. Film alum Jon Haller '09 was in the writers room and is credited on two episodes, "Future Husband" and "I Heart Connecticut." While the series takes place in fictionalized offices at NBC's headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center, the show was filmed on a sound stage in Long Island City.