Subway grates at Broadway & 46th Street

Max Neuhaus’s Times Square is a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the north end of the triangular pedestrian island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City. Originally installed at this site from 1977 to 1992, the Times Square Street Business Improvement District (BID), and Christine Burgin collaborated with MTA Arts for Transit and Dia to reinstate the project in May of 2002. Following the relaunch in 2002, Times Square by Max Neuhaus was donated to the Dia Art Foundation, the current owner maintaining the piece.

In 2006, Neuhaus told the New York Times that he “wanted a work that wouldn’t need indoctrination,” that allowed the visitor to “take possession of it as their own discovery.” Times Square was intended to be overlooked, embedded in the urban landscape, until it emerged as a sort of personal revelation. Visitors and residents in Times Square may experience the artwork 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Drawing No. 4, Aural Topography of Plane: Ear Height Above, Max Neuhaus, Times Square, 1977

About Max Neuhaus

Max Neuhaus(1939-2009) was an American musician, composer and artist who was a noted interpreter of contemporary and experimental percussion music in the 1960s. He went on to create numerous permanent and short-term sound installations in the four decades that followed. Neuhaus is the pioneer of artistic activities with sound. A renowned interpreter of contemporary music while still in his twenties, Neuhaus went on to become the first to extend sound as an autonomous medium into the domain of contemporary art.