They’re not giving the MTA a pass.
The offbeat artists who use MetroCards for their masterpieces are in mourning as the blue-and-plastic passes are about to be swiped off the face of the Earth.
“I was really in denial for a long, long time,” said artist Thomas McKean, who had hoped the infamous disorganization of the MTA would mean that the contactless OMNY system would never truly replace the old card system.
“I really am in a sort of gradual layers of — I know there are more important things in the world to be upset about — grief and shock that they seemingly, in the middle of the night, removed all the MetroCard machines from the subways. They were there one day and gone the next.”
McKean has been using the cards in his artwork for more than two decades, ever since his creative juices first started flowing in the subway as he wondered how many words he could make using the 10 letters in “MetroCard.”
Since then, he’s sold hundreds of thousands of coffee cups, baseball caps, skyscrapers and other mosaics made entirely of cut-up MetroCards — including imitation MetroCards made from the real ones’ carcasses.
“There’s something about the MetroCard,” McKean said, adding that even tourists from “Iowa to Ireland” see the iconic value in the piece of plastic.
“It is one of these inanimate objects that managed somehow to almost feel alive,” he added. “It had a spirit to it and it was a commonality amongst New Yorkers. Everybody had one in their wallet or their pocket. People really developed a fondness for it.”
“I don’t see that with the OMNY card. It seems like it was designed by a committee.”
McKean has a stockpile of a few thousand MetroCards in his home, which he anticipates will last him several more years if he continues using every last shard.
“It’s a strange thought that one day I won’t have enough to finish a collage. I’m trying to brace myself for that,” McKean said.
Fellow collagist Nina Boesch estimates she has around 90,000 MetroCards stashed in her West Village studio — enough to last her for a few decades more of art-making.
The German immigrant had been operating in a scarcity mindset since arriving in the Big Apple in 2001 and seeing hundreds of discarded plastic cards littered across the streets — and her collection continuously grew by the thousands as eco-conscious groups like the Green Broadway Alliance began donating to her cause.
“They were everywhere! And my mindset was always, ‘this is trash that shouldn’t be trash.’ This plastic trash is so iconic,” Boesch said.
The artist’s first collage was a massive map of the US as a gift for her host family — who urged her to continue the art form.
Boesch has since zeroed in on the Big Apple as her inspiration, crafting incredible street-crawling rats, Statues of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridges out of the tiny plastic bits.
While she’s not worried about running out of cards anytime soon, Boesch admitted that the demand for the all-but-gone MetroCards could eventually drive up the cost of her masterpieces.
“With the Metro card going away, it’s almost like we’re losing this landmark or this icon that we’re all so used to. It’s almost like being nostalgic about it, that the MetroCard will be no more,” Boesch said, calling the plastic payment card a “souvenir of the past.”
“It might be wishful thinking, but I think the memory of the MetroCard will stick around for years to come. I don’t think it will be forgotten anytime soon.”
