Elevating Employees to Artwork
It’s said that too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth, but the adage applies to other artistic pursuits as well. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) recently learned that three is the ideal number for a mural project: the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Delta Air Lines and the Queens Museum.
The trio’s successful collaboration facilitated The Ones Who Make It Run by Aliza Nisenbaum, a large-scale mural in Terminal C that portrays workers who assist travelers and keep aircraft flying in and out of the facility day after day, night after night. A diverse group of 16 employees from Delta, the Port Authority and their contracted service providers was selected to represent many thousands of others. Among those depicted are airline crew members, maintenance and facilities workers, a taxi dispatcher, customer service personnel and a case worker from an outreach organization for those experiencing homelessness.
“I had no idea before I started this, the tremendous amount of labor that goes into running an airport,” Nisenbaum said in a documentary about the project. “My artwork is about the everyday people who work, the labor that it takes to put together an airport, and putting a face to that labor.”
In addition to taking photos of her subjects to reference while painting, Nisenbaum spends hours getting to know each one and listening to their stories so she can do their faces, bodies and personalities justice with every brushstroke. Typically, this happens in person, but the COVID-19 pandemic prompted her to videochat with subjects for the LGA project instead. The international artist and professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts describes her process as extremely deliberate and slow, with each portrait taking three to 10 hours to sketch and paint.
After Nisenbaum completed her composite portrait of the terminal’s workforce, a historic glass and mosaic studio called Mayer of Munich translated it into a glass mosaic mural. The airport displayed a reproduction of Nisenbaum’s original oil painting until the roughly 6½- by-17-foot mosaic was installed
in late April 2024.
The Ones Who Make It Run is one of several foundational pieces commissioned for Delta’s $4 billion redevelopment project that replaced terminals C and D with the new Terminal C. The Port Authority, Delta and Queens Museum collaborated to elevate the travel experience for guests in the 1.2 million-square-foot terminal by adding permanent large-scale works from six locally based artists that celebrate the cultural heritage of New York City and honor its immigrant story.
