During the late afternoon, something strange, yet inviting, takes place in the Champ-de-Mars Metro.
No matter which platform you stand on, waiting for the train, beams of emerald, scarlet, burnt orange, and mauve make up abstract shapes on the concrete. These pools of coloured light come from the Metro pavilion above, as light bursts through panels of antique glass that make up Les grandes formes qui dansent by painter and stained-glass artist Marcelle Ferron.
This piece is significant to the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) and the fabric of Montreal's artistic history and culture for two reasons: First, it was constructed at Champ-de-Mars station in 1968 as part of the first 10 pieces of art in Montreal’s Metro, and second, it was the first avant-garde art piece to appear in the system.
But achieving this form of freedom first required overturning the era's dominant and traditional artistic vision.
Clashing art schools
In the mid-1960s, while Montreal’s Metro stations were being built, its traditionalist artistic director Robert LaPalme wanted each piece of art to commemorate a historical moment in Montreal. This led to the creation of pieces like Frédéric Back’s Histoire de la musique à Montréal in Place-des-Arts Metro and Les Patriotes de 1837-1838 by artists Jean Cartier and George Juhasz in Papineau Metro.
But Ferron’s non-figurative style resisted LaPalme’s nationalistic vision for Metro art. Ferron, a huge player in the avant-garde Automatiste art movement, believed public art should be free of predetermined themes of the past and created with complete freedom of expression.
LaPalme tried to publicly denounce Ferron and her artistic style, but the Premier of Quebec, Daniel Johnson, who was in office from 1966 to 1968, wouldn’t have it. He personally told the STM and LaPalme that the Government of Quebec would sponsor Les grandes formes qui dansent only if Ferron was the aesthetic master of the project. Ferron became the only artist to create a non-figurative piece for a Metro station while LaPalme was its artistic director.
Nature in an underground jungle
Today, the STM’s metro is filled with 100 pieces of public art, and a great number of them could be considered abstract and non-figurative. Two of the newest pieces of metro art were created by multi-disciplinary artist Véronique La Perrière M. The two-part piece that debuted in 2025, entitled Rives scintillantes, hangs as two ceramic works on the east side of the Place-Saint-Henri metro station. It is made up of blue ceramic pieces depicting Lac à la Loutre and the Saint-Pierre River, two bodies of water that have nearly disappeared since the 19th century.
“I started looking at old maps of Montreal, and in the 16th century, the Island of Montreal had about 40 lakes and 10 rivers that are all gone now,” La Perrière M says in front of her ceramic mural at Place-Saint-Henri. “I was really interested in Saint-Henri because I lived here for 20 years, and before all of the industrialization, the village of Saint-Henri was surrounded by marshes, lakes and rivers.”
As she was digging through the City of Montreal’s archives, La Perrière M found the oldest photo of Saint-Henri, taken in 1859 by the English photographer Alexander Henderson. The photo showed the Village des Tanneries, a hub for cleaning and soaking animal hides during the 17th century.
“So I started to dream that you could see the lake in this photo, and I wanted to see more, but there are no photos or drawings of the lake.”
La Perrière M’s focus was on part of the photo that displayed foliage from Poplar and American Elm trees hanging over a few homes. She then replaced the architecture with a glistening lake surrounded by distinct flora like the Canada Lily, Starry Smilacine, and Winged Yellow Aster.
In her deep dive into Montreal’s hydrographic history, La Perrière M also found that when Place-Saint-Henri was inaugurated in 1980, it was an architectural nightmare because the ground was full of water. “So I was like, ‘OK, that’s the [Saint-Pierre] river. She’s still there,” La Perrière M says with a smile. To honour her river system, La Perrière M added what she calls a “constellation” or a “secret code” on her piece hanging at the top of the Metro system, which actually maps out the points of the old river.
“You know, there is a meaning to everything in my piece, but people don’t need to know that. I think public art is just meant to be aesthetic and make you feel good.”
Les Boîtes vivantes by artist Shelley Miller is another vibrant dual ceramics piece that conveys some natural history of Montreal and makes Metro commuters feel good. Her two pieces, which have rested on both the Angrignon platform walls since 2022, are a “cabinet of curiosities” that retell the zoological history of Angrignon Park.
“So there was a small zoo in Parc La Fontaine, and a lot of the animals would winter here in Angrignon Park,” Miller says, standing by one of the pieces. “So these boxes show the park’s history in its pristine state before the winter zoo [negative tiles of the park’s trees] and some of the animals [lizards, parrots, an owl] I found when I was diving through the actual archive boxes, which were like in this treasure trove of cool shit.”
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