“Every One” is the first of a three-piece installation by the artist Nick Cave, inside the new 42nd Street connector at Times Square. The other two parts — “Each One” at the new shuttle entrance and “Equal All” on the center island platform wall — will be installed in 2022. The $1.8 million budget for the project, commissioned by M.T.A. Arts & Design, is part of the overall project to rebuild and reconfigure the 42nd Street Shuttle. The Soundsuits, depicted in the artwork, are wearable fabric sculptures typically made of materials such as twigs, wire, raffia and even human hair that often generate sound when the wearer moves. Walking along the new corridor, figures on the wall are depicted leaping and twirling in mosaic Soundsuits. These have always been an amalgam of cultural references: the concepts of shamans and masquerade, obscuring the race, gender and class of the wearer and forging a new identity. They contain ties to Africa, the Caribbean and Haiti. Cave created his mosaic from recomposed source photos of the Soundsuits in motion shot by James Prinz and interpreted in glass by Meyer of Munich.
