“Wild Things,” a suite of six mosaics by artist Fred Tomaselli, brings some of the nature of New York City down into the underground at the 14 St Station Complex ​​​​​​, connecting the 14 St-7 Av and 14 St-6 Av stations in Manhattan. The Brooklyn-based artist, an avid birder, draws from his own multi-sensory bird watching experiences and presents these encounters in his signature style. With a focus on species that live year-round in New York City, temporal reality enters Tomaselli’s imagined world in scenes that include: orioles mobbing a falcon, an owl's gaze, a cosmic cardinal, woodpecker with sonic swirls, a bright sky full of abstract clouds in blue hues, and earth represented by the flaming red petals of a dahlia.

“Wild Things” is Tomaselli's first mosaic project, as well as his first permanent public artwork in Manhattan. His signature style of mixed-media painting has been translated into the new medium by Mayer of Munich, employing a variety of fabrication techniques to capture the artist’s original collaged and painted images in glass and ceramic mosaic. The intricate compositions are composed of vibrant traditional smalti, custom-made buttons, and printed glass in a collage-like manner. In addition to depictions by his own hand, the artist typically includes newsprint as a collage material, evident in the Ben-Day dots style printed glass seen on the cardinal image and rays infiltrating the cloud.

The mosaics can be found in 14 St-7Av ​​​ station at the stairs to Uptown and Downtown platforms, in 14 St-6 Av ​​​ station Uptown & Queens mezzanine, and in the passage connecting to 6 Av alongside the renovated ADA ramp. 

Fred Tomaselli was born in California (1956, Santa Monica, CA), and has lived in Brooklyn since 1985. Drawing upon art historical sources and Eastern and Western decorative traditions, his multi-media artworks depicting scenes from nature are comprised of mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. Venues for solo exhibitions include the Laguna Art Museum; the Joslyn Art Museum; the Oceanside Museum of Art; the Toledo Museum of Art; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; the Orange County Museum of Art; the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris. A survey exhibition opened at Aspen Art Museum and toured to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Brooklyn Museum.