BART Stations Take On Literary Air With New Posters

The next time you are on the platform at the BART station in Pleasant Hill, you may notice some curious posters mixed in with the usual advertisements.

One shows a man who looks like he stepped off the cover of a pulp-fiction detective novel. He's standing inside a BART train with an open book in his hand and only a slighty perturbed expression on his face while an Alaskan dog sled pulled by six huskies races past him in the snow-filled car. 

If you look closely at the book in his hand, you'll see that it's The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

Another poster depicts a seated woman in BART car holding an open copy of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Around her is a smoky scene depicting two women in traditional Chinese garb, paper lanterns and butterflies.

A third artwork shows a Sam Spade-type man holding a black falcon statuette on a BART train, looking back at a statuesque blonde seated in the car who is highly suggestive of Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Another passenger is shown reading The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

The three arworks belong to a poster-art program being installed in unused advertising spaces in a number of BART stations around the system.

They are the creations of artist Owen Smith of Alameda, whose work may be familiar to many people since he's done 18 New Yorker covers, illustrations for detective and children's books and a number of public art works including murals at a Brooklyn subway station and Dashiell Hammett-themed posters on kiosks along Market Street.

“I like doing art that’s accessible,” Smith said in a BART news release. “I like gallery work, too, but the BART posters don't depend on someone going into a gallery to see them. It can be part of their daily lives, their daily commute."

Like two previous BART poster-art pojects, the works in this series do not contain explicit messages.

“If it’s a little mysterious, that’s OK,” Smith said.

BART said Smith, who teaches at the California College of the Arts, liked the idea that reading on BART allowed travel of the mind as well as of the physical body.

“You can spend your time reading on BART, whether it’s a book or on your Kindle or iPad,” Smith said.