Meet the TMU candidate behind TTC’s new Bay station installation

Toronto’s Bay subway station has a new vibrant and colourful look. Francisco-Fernando Granados, Media & Design Innovation PhD (opens in new window)  candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University (opens in new window) , embarked on the station’s beautification project in 2021 and celebrated its opening to the public on February 8th, 2026. 

Titled confluence, the installation frames Toronto as a meeting place, emphasizing its daily hustle and bustle in contrast with the calm of nature.

“Toronto always felt to me like a place where so many things would come together, and there's a kind of beautiful intensity to that. But there's also a vertiginousness to it, that can make it quite overwhelming.”

For Granados, the site can be a feeling of respite that brings in patterns and palettes different from the environment that surrounds it. Bringing in the station name, the artwork’s title reflects a natural phenomenon: the peaceful meeting of two bodies of water to form a bay. Public artworks tell the story of the city, said Granados. Similarly, confluence highlights themes of inclusion and the making of home in Toronto.

The work is made of vitreous glass mosaic that creates a concentric composition in blues, greens, and pinks. Each of the walls, the ceiling, and the entrance is a site-specific translation of Granados’ digital drawing. Granados took the time to visit and observe the site, the station, and the city overall as part of the creation process. 

“I started, as often as I could, to go to the site and the different parts of the station and try to figure out what happened there, who passed through, how it was used,” he said. “I would take the [mosaic] samples to the site at different times of the day to figure out how the light would hit the different colours.”

The installation is a collaboration with architect Kurt Kraler. The two began working on the project after a successful proposal to the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) Easier Access & Second Exit Project (external link, opens in new window) , which aims to foster safety and modernization in Toronto subway stations. 

Through Kraler’s translation of the drawing into the architectural plan, the visual story of the piece came to life.

“The piece highlights the dialogue between visual art and architecture, creating something that felt like a thoughtful conversation between the lines that I’ve drawn and the structure of the space,” said Granados.

It became a further collaborative effort between Granados, Kraler, and an ensemble of those who assembled the mosaic, deconstructed the old tiles of the station, installed the artwork, and all those who kept the operation running, he said.

Granados has been working on this project throughout his PhD studies. He highlighted the role of the program in providing the opportunity to think about knowledge production as an artist in a public role, beyond art production for a market or the academic sphere. For Granados, practice as research is a core element of the program.

As part of the TTC Public Art Program (external link, opens in new window) , the work is a permanent installation. With his decades-long portfolio of artwork with the past ten years focused on abstraction, the question of permanence gave Granados the opportunity for a challenge. 

“I feel humbled by being given the chance, given the trust, that my vision was trusted,” said Granados. “I also feel a huge sense of responsibility, because not only is it public funds, it's also something that everybody who passes through there might have an opinion on.”

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