In 1994, when the MetroCard made its début, many straphangers were reluctant to say farewell to the subway token. Across the city, commuters struggled to master “the swipe.” The Times noted a few techniques, like “swinging your hand” at the turnstile as if it were “a slow tennis ball coming your way.” That hard-won expertise is now defunct. On December 31st, the M.T.A. stopped selling MetroCards, which have been fully replaced with the tap-and-go OMNY system. This was tough news for Nina Boesch, a Brooklyn-based artist who has spent twenty-five years turning the flimsy yellow-and-blue plastic cards into intricate collages.

“My first thought was, Oh, no. Oh, shit!” she said the other day, in her Greenpoint studio. “There was a moment of panic.” Using scissors, Boesch, who trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, typically snips cards into pieces and reassembles them into depictions of such subjects as Lady Liberty, Yankee Stadium, Andy Warhol, Derek Jeter, and Pizza Rat. She sells the work on her website and at craft fairs around the city; prices range from ninety dollars, for a business-card-size piece, to more than ten thousand dollars, for commissions, like a six-foot map of Tokyo. Not bad, considering Boesch gets her materials for free.

The venture began as an exercise in litter control. In 2001, Boesch said, “I was a naïve twenty-two-year-old from Germany, and I thought I could help the city a little bit by clearing up the stations. In Germany, you have to recycle. It’s a law.” She went on, “So I’d go around picking MetroCards up from the floor, and people would give me weird looks. Once, a station attendant came out of his booth and confronted me—he thought I was going to sell swipes. This was before mobile phones, so I couldn’t exactly show him what I had in mind.”

In her studio—a snug room on the second floor of a co-working space near McCarren Park—Boesch rifled through an album of laminated fare cards that she’d collected over the years. There was the old faithful (“This is from the inaugural limited edition—very cool!”), the exotic rarity (“I’m a huge fan of David Bowie, so this Ziggy Stardust card”—from 2018—“is a particular favorite”), and the historical footnote (“This one announced the 2012 Olympics in New York, but obviously they stopped printing those when we lost the bid”).

Boesch, who had on a white shirt and jeans, pulled out a ziplock bag stuffed with thick stacks of intact cards. “I’m so paranoid about my precious MetroCards that I actually keep them in different places,” she said. “There are about seventy thousand in a storage unit, probably ten thousand or so in the studio, and then another ten thousand in a closet at home.” She held up the bag: “This right here is about two thousand cards.”

Michael Bloomberg, Itzhak Perlman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Martin Scorsese each own one of Boesch’s pieces. A few years back, the wife of a Hollywood A-lister commissioned her to make a four-foot rendition of the R.M.S. Queen Elizabeth as a surprise gift for her husband, whose father had taken the ship when immigrating to the States.

Although Boesch will miss the swipe, she understood why the M.T.A. made the move to the OMNY system. “Culturally speaking, it’s totally the right thing to do, and it’s better for the environment,” she said. With the phaseout, she’s counting on an uptick of interest. “I think people will be nostalgic about MetroCards for a long time, and, if anything, my art will probably become more valuable,” she said. Her existing card stash, she estimated, will likely last her twenty to thirty years. As for her own commute, she prefers to walk. ♦