Art at South Station, hidden in plain sight

It’s easy to spot the new ornate archways and towering domed ceiling that greet the rush of commuters stepping off the trains during rush hour at South Station in Boston.

Herds of people, fresh off the train, branch out in the storm of construction crews working on the final phase of the South Station renovation project.

And just across the way, beyond the platform, lies a mystery that has faded with time.

“Are they lanterns or oil lamps?” asks Ozge Whiting of Providence.

Whiting has been taking the commuter rail from Providence to Boston for a decade and admits she never really noticed what hangs from the ceiling at the station’s original entrance. She, like so many other commuters, for years have passed under it on their way to work, including Emma Malbon who also commutes into Boston from Providence.

“I don’t know what they are, I’m curious now,” says Malbon, gazing upwards.

Tony Burns of Boston takes a wild guess, his eyes traveling up about 20 feet.

“What, a camera? I don’t know.”

The guesses varied from “left-over Christmas ornaments” to chess pieces hanging from the ceiling resembling a scene from “The Queen’s Gambit.”

“I’m perfectly happy with people coming to their own conclusions about how the symbolism might work or what it suggests to them”, says Jeffrey Schiff, the artist who designed the hanging sculptures.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Administration commissioned Schiff in the 1980sto create the sculpture that he calls Destinations. He installed the work in 1995.

“What I wanted to do is make a kind of a symbolic or allegorical version of the act of travel that the station represented,” he says.

The artwork consists of 25 fabricated steel spools with attached cables crisscrossing the length of the ceiling. The cables lead to gothic looking cast bronze pieces that Schiff says symbolizes the journey of a typical passenger.

Local multimedia artist Elisa Hamilton hopped on the red line to meet at South Station to talk about Destinations.

Hamilton is a big supporter of bringing more art into the public arena. But she emphasizes that we are in an age where public art is competing with people looking down at their iPhones. Still, that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for community art.

”It’s about connecting with each other. It’s about connecting with a sense of space, right? Feel present in the city,” she says.

Now Hamilton hopes some effort would be made to bring Destinations back to life. The dangling pieces are covered in a carpet of dust. Hamilton says the installation looks like it needs some care.

Another visual impediment to the artwork is that the original Destinations had to be reconfigured to accommodate an escalator for the Red Line. That project partially obscured Schiff’s work and marginalized it. The hanging sculptures are literally pushed toward the edges of the ceiling, diminishing the visual impact.

It could be one reason why commuter Emma Malbon never noticed the hanging sculpture over all the years of taking the commuter rail into Boston. But then, she points to a man riding the escalator with his head bent over his phone.

“The way we’re bombarded with images now, to notice something subtle like that is pretty rare,” Malbon said.

Malbon, who describes herself as a curious observer, is grateful to know about Destinations. It’s like a new friend greeting her,  but in this case she’ll have to look up to say, “Hi.”

“I like it. Now that I know it’s here, I’m definitely going to look at it now.”