In the netherworld beneath Grand Central Station—where elbows clash, clocks tick, and the steel breath of the city never sleeps—something quietly miraculous has unfurled. Abstract Futures, a 600-square-foot glass mosaic by the feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost, is more than public art. It’s a metaphysical fresco disguised as a subway mural.

Created by Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder in collaboration with MTA Arts & Design, the mural doesn’t simply brighten the tiled bones of a station corridor. It pulses with spiritual intent. Tarot, cosmology, and abstraction converge in this chromatic labyrinth, calling back to the mystic mother of modern abstraction herself: Hilma af Klint.

This is not a mural you glance at. This is a mural that looks back.

Spiritual Modernism, Reanimated in Glass

The ghost in question—Hilma—is no longer a secret. Once shunned by the narrative of Modernism for her esoteric femininity, Hilma af Klint has since surged into art history’s center stage, her lush spiritual diagrams now canonized by institutions like the Guggenheim. But Hilma’s Ghost isn’t just name-checking a pioneer. They’re reviving her ethos, ritual by ritual, pigment by pigment.

Founded in 2020 at the height of COVID-19’s quiet apocalypse, Hilma’s Ghost channels a lineage of female mystics and visionaries—Af Klint, yes, but also Leonora Carrington, Agnes Pelton, Emma Kunz. Their latest invocation takes shape in the most unlikely of sanctuaries: a New York City subway hallway.

Here, geometric abstractions don’t signify design. They conjure destiny.

Reading the Mural Like a Tarot Spread

Abstract Futures isn’t static decoration—it’s a three-act myth, a hero’s journey mapped in mosaics. Walk it from left to right and you’re no longer a commuter; you’re a Seeker.

Act I – “The Fool”

Crimson, tangerine, and sunlight yellows ignite the mural’s first section, vibrating with the volatile potential of beginnings. Triangles dart forward like decisions. Diamonds glint like intuition. This is “The Fool”—not a clown, but the brave innocent stepping toward unknown futures. The starting point of becoming.

Act II – “Wheel of Fortune”

Color cools. Greens, ochres, and earth tones take the wheel—literally. Circular motifs swirl and overlap, pulling “The Fool” down into gravity. Here lies the material world: cyclical, transactional, full of rise and collapse. This is where chance flirts with fate. A daily New York dance.

Act III – “The World”

Arriving at the final panel—nearest the fare array, as if guarding the gate to reentry—“The World” blooms. Celestial bodies orbit in radiant contrast: deep blues against solar flares, stars pulsing beside moons. It is creation. Completion. The end that doubles as beginning.

The light returns, and symbols of regeneration and rebirth begin the cycle again.

– The artists write.

If there’s a message, it’s this: transcendence isn’t elsewhere. It’s encoded in the commute.

Feminism, Faith, and Public Space

What Hilma’s Ghost achieves here is more than homage—it’s alchemy. They fold together feminism, mysticism, abstraction, and civic engagement into one shimmering form. The mural isn’t didactic. It whispers. It murmurs in color. It reminds.

In a moment when public art is often reduced to selfie bait or branding strategy, Abstract Futures insists on ambiguity and invitation. It asks you to believe in something—if only for the time it takes the train to arrive.

That belief is radical. Especially in a city like New York. Especially underground.

Abstract Art That Isn’t Empty

We’ve been sold the lie that abstraction is neutral, universal, bloodless. But Hilma’s Ghost—like Af Klint before them—reclaims the symbolic and the sacred from the sterilized hands of modernism. Their abstraction isn’t clean or cool. It’s radiant. Messy. Political.

By integrating tarot and color symbolism into a commuter artery, Tegeder and Ray slyly democratize mysticism. They invite strangers—tired, late, scrolling—to enter a visual spell. To see their lives not as chaotic blur, but as part of an arc.

Abstract Futures becomes not a mural, but a map. One etched in intuition and intention.

Art That Commutes With You

In its final glow, Abstract Futures returns the subway to the sacred. Not in an ornamental sense, but in the truest one: it renders the everyday mythic. The rush to the platform, the crush of bodies, the pulse of the train—all part of a larger current. The Fool walks again. The Wheel turns. The World awaits.

And maybe, just maybe, that glimmer you caught from the corner of your eye—between the MetroCard swipe and the turnstile click—wasn’t glass at all. It was a signal.

You’re already on the journey.