‘New York Was Yesterday’ is an ongoing collection of more than 2,160 “WET PAINT” signs removed from New York City subway stations since 2021. Through collecting, cataloging, mapping, and painting, the artist transforms an overlooked object of urban maintenance into an evolving archive of the city and a record of personal movement through it. Each sign marks an attempt to cover what came before. As layers of fresh paint accumulate, the traces of the past are concealed but never entirely erased.
The collection’s maps and charts reveal patterns of distribution and travel, while three anatomically precise paintings distinguish the signs’ three known visual types. Altered signs and contributions from friends introduce unexpected encounters and individual histories into the archive. Balancing systematic documentation with personal observation, ‘New York Was Yesterday’ considers how ordinary objects acquire meaning through attention. What begins as a mechanical act of collecting becomes a meditation on memory, urban change, and the histories embedded beneath the city’s surfaces.
