The Underbelly Project, sixteen years after the tunnel

At the start of November 2010 the Underbelly Project stopped being a rumour. Two street artists working as Workhorse and PAC had spent the previous year and a half taking painters down into a disused space under New York, one at a time, and the photographs went out through two Sunday papers, one in New York and one in London. More than a hundred artists had taken part. Each had worked alone for a night, by the light of a torch, on concrete four storeys below the street.

The shell under South Fourth Street

The organisers did not name the place. Subway enthusiasts settled within days on the shell beneath South Fourth Street in Williamsburg, built in the early 1930s above the Crosstown line’s Broadway stop as a transfer point for a planned second wave of subway building. That wave never came, and no train has ever served the station. It has poured concrete, unfinished stairs and no lighting.

The transit authority’s response in the first week was to say it would inspect this site and others like it, look for the ways in and seal them. Its spokesman also said it had no intention of painting over or removing the work. Within a fortnight, local transit coverage reported that around twenty people had been arrested for trespassing while hunting for the gallery, and that those who reached it found local writers had already tagged over parts of it.

The station has never been opened to visitors, before the project or since, so in practice the site simply went dark again, which is roughly what it had been all along.

A secret that had to be told

The project’s argument was that art could be made for nobody. Nothing could be bought or visited, and so nothing could be owned. Reviewing the book of the project in 2012, the poet and critic Jeffrey Cyphers Wright called making work nobody is allowed to see “subversive and liberating”, a refusal of the market’s hold on the art. The Brooklyn Rail review also noted that every piece in it was site-specific by nature.

Yet the work only exists for most people because the secret was broken on purpose. The book, We Own the Night: The Art of the Underbelly Project, came out from Rizzoli in February 2012 with around three hundred photographs. A pop-up show of Underbelly artists followed in Miami during Art Basel week, and Workhorse and PAC organised a smaller version under Paris. The criminologist Jeff Ferrell, writing in the journal Rhizomes in 2013, read the whole thing as edgework: skilled performance under real risk, hidden in the dark and then carried into the light through documentation and institutions. On his account the project closed on the same night it opened, and its public life began there.

The film

The latest chapter is a documentary directed by Workhorse and PAC themselves, built from footage shot during the project and interviews with the artists. It had its premiere at Miami Art Week on 1 December 2024, helped through post-production by a $12,000 grant from Arterial. Participants named in the material around it include Ron English, Swoon, Faile, Revok and Shepard Fairey.

So the paintings are still, as far as anyone has said publicly, on the walls of a station that never opened, seen by almost no one. The secrecy made them a story, and the story is the part that travelled.