On your right, look for a giant rectangular wall covered in red and pink paint, where bold curving lines sweep upward across a twelve-story facade like an abstract body stretched against the city.
This is Venus, Knox Martin’s enormous mural on the south side of Bayview Correctional Facility, and it arrived here in nineteen seventy thanks to Doris Freedman’s CityWalls, the early public-art group that later became the Public Art Fund. Martin picked this wall very deliberately: it stood beside Eleventh Avenue and the West Side Highway, visible from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and even the New Jersey shore. Imagine that confidence... not a painting tucked inside a gallery, but a love letter to New York blasted across the skyline.
Art writer Marilyn Kushner called it Martin’s love poem to the city. You can feel that in the design: soft, feminine curves pushing against the hard straight lines of the surrounding architecture. Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, becomes both a woman and a portrait of New York itself... erotic, muscular, restless.
And here’s a detail I adore: advertisers kept asking to turn this giant wall into a billboard, but the state said no. They didn’t want Venus covered by a beer or jeans ad. In nineteen ninety-eight, restorers and the Public Art Fund protected it with a special weather-resistant acrylic developed with Martin and donated by Golden Artist Colors, meant to last at least seventy-five years. If you check your screen, that old transit-of-Venus drawing captures the same long human fascination with the name Martin borrowed for this mural. Today, a newer building blocks most of the work, which makes this surviving glimpse feel even more precious.
It’s a stubborn, gorgeous reminder that public art does not have to sell you anything. When you’re ready, we can continue toward Chelsea Market.
