German artist Nina Boesch uses discarded New York Metro Cards to create beautiful mosaics inspired by the Big Apple. The resourceful collage master reckons she has used about 30,000 metro cards, so far.

To most New-Yorkers, the iconic metro card becomes just a useless piece of plastic after they’ve gotten on the subway, but for Nina Boesch it becomes an invaluable piece of art precisely after it’s been thrown away. The 33-year old artist gathers material for her amazing mosaics scouring the metro stations of New York City. “I can’t leave a subway station without looking around, it’s almost OCD at this point,” she says. “Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a whole stack of them.” She has become famous for using hundreds of these yellow, black and blue pieces of plastic to create intricate collages, each with its own New York-inspired theme. So far she has assembled portraits of famous New-Yorkers like Woody Allen and Catherine Hepburn, as well as renditions of the Statue of Liberty, yellow cabs or the New York Subway.

Nina Boesch remembers she started working with discarded metro cards 11 years ago, while looking for an inexpensive gift for her host family . She was a young German artist who had come to New York as part of an exchange program, so she was on a very tight budget. All she had was used Metro Cards so she decided to make something out of them. She ended up creating a map of the United States for her hosts, and they loved it so much that they kept pushing her to pursue her unique art style further. Since that first art piece, Boecsh has used over 30,000 Metro cards to make her collages, which now sell for between $200 and $2,500.

Photos: Nina Boesch

via NY Daily News