Ready when you are, Terminal C is now an art destination

When Delta Air Lines’ Terminal C at La Guardia Airport opens to the public on Saturday, New York will get not only a gleaming new transportation hub but also a significant art destination. “Airports are gateways to a region — travelers should know where they are,” said Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates La Guardia. “Public art is at the core of that aspect of building a new civic structure.” Large-scale permanent installations by Mariam Ghani, Rashid Johnson, Aliza Nisenbaum, Virginia Overton, Ronny Quevedo and Fred Wilson — all artists living and working in New York — are poised to become new city landmarks throughout the terminal. In Terminal B, four site-specific pieces by Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens and Sarah Sze were commissioned by La Guardia Gateway Partners with the Public Art Fund in a $10 million investment unveiled in 2020. A restored 1942 mural by James Brooks in Terminal A nods to the heyday of Works Progress Administration artists employed in the service of grand infrastructure projects. And a soaring 40-foot-high Richard Lippold sculpture, which hung at Lincoln Center for decades, will become the centerpiece of an atrium to be completed this year. As the largest carrier in New York, employing 10,000 people in the area prepandemic (and now back up to over 9,000), Delta wanted the artworks in its terminal “to be New York-centric and reflect the diversity of our company,” said Ryan Marzullo, a managing director with the company who is overseeing the $4b Terminal C project, now 80% finished. For each of the six artists chosen by the Delta team from dozens initially presented by the Queens Museum, it’s been an opportunity to push their practices in terms of scale and experimentation, according to the museum’s president and executive director, Sally Tallant. “All these works are very rooted in what it means to live in New York,” she said.<br/>