Meg Saligman presents The Ministry of Awe

From the moment a visitor enters the 19th-century former bank building and ventures down a concrete-floored corridor past a vitrine with an ancient adding machine and a placard reading, “Thank you for your deposit of intelligence”—it’s clear that this place aims to turn the ethos of capitalism on its head.

A framed painting of a woman—animated, like the portraits in Hogwarts—utters a mellifluous welcome to “the bank that values you,” then poses the essential question of this collaborative, innovative, not-exactly-a-museum: “What do you value?”

A wild pastiche

What follows—six stories, 8,500 square feet of murals and sculpture and textiles and robotics and videos and soundscapes created by more than 100 artists—is a wild pastiche, much of it interactive, some of it opaque, all of it demanding that visitors suspend their yen to “get it” and instead surrender to the unexpected, the playful, the inspiring and the just plain weird.

Ministry of Awe is the brainchild of artist Meg Saligman, best known for her large-scale Philadelphia murals that weave contemporary themes with people and symbols from fantasy and history. She bought the former Manufacturers National Bank, designed by Victorian architect Frank Furness, in 2022, and invited artists—some established, some emerging—to collaborate.

What unites this Philly-centric (recurring motifs of Birds and cheesesteaks), site-specific work is the place itself, a building that includes a grand atrium, a shadowy basement, and dozens of alcoves, stairwells, and half-lofts reachable (for those able and willing to climb) by wooden ladders.

Choose your path

There is art everywhere you turn, even in the bathrooms: floor-to-ceiling murals and, in one, a wall-mounted, miniature laundromat, complete with dollhouse-sized bottles of Tide.

Bygone technology is a recurrent theme: heaps of battered typewriters, clunky calculators, a Canon copier, a Singer sewing machine, a computer monitor with its glass shattered and melted into green-black crags. These instruments—game-changers when they were new—remind us that time is both swift and slow. Today’s technology will soon be obsolete; at the same time, this detritus of metal and plastic will take centuries to decompose.

There is no set path for visitors to the Ministry; you simply wander (I’d recommend 90 minutes to two hours) where inclination beckons: Where does this ladder lead? Ah, to a small landing filled with bright Mesoamerican bas-reliefs—animals, figures, painted skulls; listen, and a recorded child’s voice begins, “My abuela told me an old story…”

What’s that soft burble? Oh, it’s a giant pig/human (breasts, cloven feet) drooling water while reclining in a clawfoot tub. The placard reads “Asset Liquification.”

Open to interpretation

The language of banking becomes a tongue-in-cheek, unifying metaphor. An area labeled “Securities” is filled with eggs (as in, haha, don’t count your chickens prematurely); shelves titled “Joint Accounts” hold pairs of salt and pepper shakers. And after flushing in the bathrooms, a voice cheerfully intones, “Thank you for your deposit.”

The Ministry is a “please touch” for visitors of all ages. Exhibits marked with a green sticker invite interaction; those with a red one are for looking only. The afternoon I visited, folks seemed tentative at first—really, I’m supposed to turn that Victrola handle? (yes, to make the 3D dollar signs on the record’s edge vanish and pop up again)—but as we ascended from floor to floor, they grew more willing to engage.

There are few explanatory notes at the Ministry, so interpretation is wide open: What’s the meaning of those embroidery hoops with elaborately stitched eyes? How about that creature—the pale, ghostly head of a baby, but with a feathered belly and clawed feet—curled in a nest? Why does a thick, creamy swipe of crown molding peel away from an arched doorway as if it’s alive?

Actors, AI, and surprises

For visitors feeling a bit lost, help is at the ready: the Ministry’s guides are no mere docents, standing soberly in corners. Costumed actors—a “clerk” in a snappy green jacket, a “priestess” in what I can only describe as astral-cowgirl-princess garb (with a headdress fashioned of computer punch cards)—are part of the experience, a performance overlay developed with Pig Iron Theatre Company.

There’s also AI, used in felicitous ways. Visitors are coaxed to forge a famous signature—I tried John Hancock’s—then have the results scanned and analyzed. The machine pronounced my attempt “more doodle than autograph, but deliciously dramatic… It’s Hancock, just wearing slippers.”

Surprises lurk, delight and confound: an alcove heaped with chalk-white bones, a giant, disembodied finger, a whimsical macrame bird, a stairwell that looks like a tie-dye explosion, with banners of chartreuse fringe that tickle your face as you ascend.

An interactive heaven

By the time I reached The Heavens—a room whose vaulted ceiling, painted by Saligman, bears images that various cultures have glimpsed in the stars—my threshold for strangeness had pretty much dissolved. So when the astral-cowgirl-princess (aka Imani Lee Williams) invited me to place my hand over a sensor, I complied, then watched in wonder as concentric ribbons of light pulsed throughout the space.

This installation takes visitor-engagement to the extreme: speak into a microphone, and your transcribed words appear on the walls. Name what you see—“wings, angel, chicken-girl” and that image will be highlighted. Sing, and a vertical band of rainbow light undulates according to your pitch.

As I watched the room darken—another visitor had activated a different sensor—and constellations emerged on the walls, I remembered lines in a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye: “There is a place to stand/where you can see so many lights/you forget you are one of them.”

We make the story

At the Ministry of Awe, visitors don’t just observe the art; we become part of it. We alter the experience through our presence. We make up the story. In a large ledger book inviting comments, someone had printed, “I can feel something awakening inside of me.” Another visitor had drawn a fish. Someone else just wrote “What?” in the middle of a single page.

Yes. All of the above.

At top: Artist Leslie Matthews created the Stairway to Heaven at the Ministry of Awe. (Photo by Kate Russell.)

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