Hello, and welcome to my studio! I’m looking forward to sharing my work and thoughts with you from my corner of Flatbush, Brooklyn and beyond.
When I arrived in NYC in the late 90’s, I took my first subway ride with a classic subway token that my brother gave me. Although the MetroCard fare cards had been rolled out a few years prior, some denizens, such as my relatives, still had more trust in the solid metal coin-like form of payment as opposed to a piece of plastic where the monetary value was not visible and seemed very impermanent. I also noticed that while it was rare to pick up a stray token off the ground, many stations had quite a lot of discarded MetroCards littered around the turnstiles. I am a magpie by nature and would always collect the cards to add to my “found objects” stash.
By the time 2002 rolled around, MetroCards were ubiquitous, and I had begun to incorporate some of my MC collection in a few art projects. This was also when the MTA announced that they planned on raising the subway fare from $1.50 to $2.00 beginning the following year. New Yorkers are known for their resilience, but this rate hike hit harder; it was the largest incremental increase since 1904, and many straphangers (myself included) were very vocal about their disapproval.
Growing up in Guatemala I had learned to sing along to Beatles songs before I even learned to speak English. Perhaps because my given name is Juan, I gravitated toward John Lennon’s work. I later learned to appreciate his lyrics and musical genius, but most of all I admired his role as a peaceful activist-artist. Thus, soon after the subway fare hikes were announced, I decided to cut up my MetroCards and created a collage portrait of my musical idol with a message of protest. Upon completing that piece I realized the potential of recycled MetroCards as a medium of artistic expression.
Fast forward to now, in 2026, the subway fare is currently $3.00 and the MetroCard has officially been phased out and replaced by the OMNY card. I have since made hundreds of portraits and other images using fragments of a piece of plastic that has propelled millions of NYC journeys. And it was just recently that I discovered that the icon who originally inspired me to make MetroCard collages also created art using fragments of physical media.
In 1970, John Lennon made a conceptual art piece named “The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game”. According to Wikipedia:
For “The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game”, Lennon took the portrait photo of himself that was included in the packaging of the 1968 The Beatles LP (aka The White Album) and cut it into 134 small rectangles. A single word was written on the back of each fragment, to be read in any order. The portrait image was meant to be reassembled in any order. “The Complete Yoko Ono Word Poem Game” was presented by Lennon to Ono on 28 July in an inscribed envelope for her to randomly assemble and reassemble at will.
The fact that John Lennon inspired me to create a portrait of him using cut up pieces of an object (MetroCard) that represented my quest for fairness, and he in turn cut up his own portrait to create fragments of poetry as an expression of love for his partner, leaves me with a greater sense of artistic creation as a means of human and spiritual connection that transcends time, circumstance, and purpose.
1968- John Lennon promotional photo portrait from the White Album (image: Wikipedia)
1970- Cut up photo portrait: The Complete Yoko Ono Word Play Game (image: Instagram @johnlennon)
1970- Reverse side of cut up photo portrait: The Complete Yoko Ono Word Play Game (image: Instagram @johnlennon)
2002-Stop the Fare Hikes poster featuring MetroCard collage of John Lennon (image: Juan Carlos Pinto archives)
0 comments