Union Square has always been a place where New York reveals itself. Protesters, chess players, skaters, tourists staring at Google Maps, couples fighting quietly on benches, and delivery workers cutting through traffic like water finding a crack in stone. The city passes through Union Square whether it wants to or not.
This week, New York-based artist Shantell Martin temporarily rewrote the square by hand.
Get Outside stretches across 7,500 square feet of pavement on the 14th Street Busway. The piece was designed by Martin and hand-painted by Brooklyn-based Colossal Media as part of Merrell’s Outside in the City program. From above, the work looks almost like a living nervous system drawn directly onto Manhattan. White lines twist across a black surface, interrupted by bursts of color and a Merrell orange thread moving through the composition like a path someone forgot they were following.
But the interesting part is not the mural itself. It is what happens once people enter it.
Most public art in New York gets consumed in passing. You glance at it while checking a text message, maybe take a photo, and then continue toward wherever you were already going. Martin’s work slows people down just enough to interrupt that rhythm. People unconsciously begin adjusting their movement once inside the drawing. Some stop in the middle of the paths as if trying to understand where they lead. Others photograph themselves from above, becoming temporary figures inside the composition.
For a moment, spectators become part of the work.
That transformation is where Martin’s strength really lives. Her visual language is deceptively simple, using handwritten lines, open space, and fragments of thought. But simplicity is often harder to achieve than complexity, especially in public space where most people are moving too fast to care. Martin understands how to create work that feels accessible without becoming empty.
The 14th Street Busway is the perfect location for this installation. Now in its sixth year as part of the Union Square Partnership’s annual mural corridor, it has quietly become one of the more interesting recurring public art programs in the city. This part of Manhattan has always functioned as a kind of emotional crossroads. Political demonstrations, public gatherings, artists, commuters, teenagers, vendors, tourists, finance workers, musicians. Everyone passes through Union Square eventually. Martin’s installation does not fight against that chaos. It absorbs it.
The result feels less like a mural and more like temporary psychological architecture.
There is also something very contemporary about the way the piece operates visually. Seen from street level, it pulls pedestrians inward. Seen from above, it becomes almost cinematic. Bodies moving through black-and-white pathways begin to resemble choreography. The city unknowingly performs inside the artwork.
The Merrell Outside in the City initiative is built around the idea that the outdoors does not begin at a trailhead. It begins the moment you step outside your door. Martin’s mural makes that argument without forcing it. It simply draws the line and waits to see who follows it.
