wednesday's words and wanderings and wonderings

This past week was spent exploring New York City and, of course taking so many photos. Choosing what to share from hundreds of photos was driving me nuts. I finally narrowed this post to three art exhibits that stood out to me, each exploring a very different medium.

The first pieces come from the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex & Store at Grand Central in Grand Central Terminal. The exhibit, Inspired by MetroCard, features artwork created from the iconic blue-and-yellow MetroCards once used throughout New York City’s subway and bus system. Introduced in 1994 to replace brass subway tokens, the MetroCard officially retired on December 31, 2025, making way for a tap-and-go payment system.

For years, artists collected the pocket-sized cards because they were bright, flexible, and endlessly available. They transformed them into sculptures, mosaics, and collages, turning an everyday object into something beautiful. The exhibit captures not only creativity, but also the fading of a distinctly New York artifact, another casualty of advancing technology.

All of the creations are quite innovative but this one really caught my eye. It's very symbolic of New York with the street map, the pigeons, and the star of this show, the MetroCard.

Before leaving for the trip, I was scrolling through a few New York social media accounts and came across information about an installation in Madison Square Park by Roberto Lugo. His exhibit, Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter), features a towering 20-foot urn along with a fire hydrant and other sculptures honoring Puerto Rican culture and community. The urn celebrates influential figures including Roberto Clemente, Bad Bunny, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Sonia Sotomayor. The entire installation feels grounded in neighborhood pride and monumental storytelling.

The final exhibit carried a personal connection back to Dayton. Artist Zachary Armstrong and my son were classmates throughout their school years, and even back then Zachary’s artistic talent was quite noticeable. Now he is exhibiting in a Lower East Side gallery in New York City and what’s more special, his son is making his debut alongside his dad.

The father-and-son exhibit fills the entire gallery space, with Zachary’s work displayed on the main level and his son’s work downstairs, reached by stepping outside and descending a sidewalk staircase. Enter chapter two.

Zachary works exclusively in encaustic, building his paintings through accumulated layers that create so much depth and texture. 

Jackson Maximo Armstrong works with textiles, constructing his pieces through multiple screen-printed layers. He often prints wet-on-wet before the colors have fully set, then runs the freshly painted panels through a hot press, to shift and transform the palette in unexpected ways.

This was such a delightful family affair!