The 2026 Art on the Underground programme will include new works by the artists Caroline Walker and Phoebe Boswell, it was announced yesterday. The programme, which turns London into a vast public art gallery, will also feature works by Hurvin Anderson, whose survey exhibition opens at Tate Britain in March featuring 80 paintings.
Anderson's commission for Brixton Underground station, which launches in November, draws on the artist’s links to the area, where he has run a studio since 1998. Claudette Johnson and Denzil Forrester are among the artists previously commissioned in the Brixton mural series.
A Tate statement released ahead of Anderson's exhibition says: “Through colour-drenched landscapes and interiors, Anderson meanders back and forth across the Atlantic, between the UK and the Caribbean.”
Writing in The Art Newspaper about the artist in 2022, the critic David Trigg said: “From the nostalgic interiors of Birmingham’s Black barbershops to the verdant landscapes of Jamaica, his art, shaped by an immersion in both British and Afro-Caribbean culture, interrogates places where history and memory collide.”
For her commission at Stratford station from September, Caroline Walker will explore what an Art on the Underground statement describes as “the often-invisible labour of women working on TfL’s (Transport for London) networks at night”. In developing the work, Walker has shadowed women working as train operators and cleaners during night shifts on Jubilee line trains.
Walker’s series of works about the experiences of women in contemporary society (Caroline Walker: Mothering) is on show at Pallant House gallery in Chichester until 10 May. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated monograph published by Lund Humphries.
In March Phoebe Boswell will install photographic assemblages on escalator panels at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Gate underground stations. The works focus on Black swimming communities, highlighting families and individuals who have historically migrated to the capital. Nairobi-born Boswell was Whitechapel Gallery’s writer in residence in 2022.
Other 2026 commissions include a new audio work produced by the London-based composer and artist Ain Bailey. Created in partnership with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme, the work will be aired this summer (29 June-10 July) at Waterloo station. The piece, which features a recording by the British-Caribbean vocalist Elaine Mitchener, throws light on 60 London premises linked to Bailey which have since closed.
