Is It an Art Gallery? A Museum? A Theater? A Dream?
The Ministry of Awe, a new immersive experience in a former bank in Philadelphia, aims to help locate the wondrous in the everyday.
Read at NYTimes.com
By Alexis Soloski | Visuals by Michelle Gustafson
Reporting from Philadelphia
Published May 7, 2026 | Updated May 20, 2026
Many banks offer sophisticated arrays of financial instruments. Few provide a chance to commune with the afterlife, to see into the future, to stand underneath a giant electronic nose that announces your particular smell: “You reek of poor financial decisions” or “Ah, fresh from the A.T.M. and regretting it.”
That nose perches above the ground floor of the Ministry of Awe, which unfolds across six stories of a 19th-century bank building in the Philadelphia neighborhood that was home to the nation’s first bank.
What is the Ministry of Awe? Meg Saligman, a co-founder, couldn’t exactly say. “Is it an art gallery?” she asked rhetorically. “Is it a theater? Is a museum? Is it a dream? It’s none of those and all of those and it doesn’t matter exactly what it is because there’s no one right way to experience it.”
The Ministry of Awe, which joins immersive installations like Meow Wolf, Otherworld and Superblue, began as a secret room in Saligman’s former studio in South Philadelphia. A celebrated Philadelphia muralist and stained glass artist, Saligman was experimenting with new ways to display and experience art. “I had a feeling of progressive isolation within our communities and a need for connection and gathering,” she said.
But because that studio wasn’t zoned for visits by the public, Saligman began to look for a new space. She partnered with Lizzie Kripke, a former art department head of Meow Wolf. Five years ago, they found the former bank, which has had lives as an art gallery and an office building. In 2023, in partnership with the Philadelphia Fringe festival, they opened a trial installation at the space, Make Bank. That trial asked questions that would become crucial to later iterations: What is your currency? What do you value? How are you spending your time?
A fund-raising round (actual currency matters, too) allowed for structural improvements to the building, which brought it up to code. Then more than 100 local artists were invited to contribute paintings, sculptures, environments and experiments to the $10 million project.
Lindsey Noel, a local artist and magician who cocreated the Department of Final Affairs, in which participants can attend their own funerals, was amazed by the spirit of collaboration and can-do among the artists and designers. “I’m 40 years old, and I’ve always been in creative worlds, nothing has ever felt like this,” she said.
The Ministry of Awe opened to the public in mid March. Tickets, which typically cost $29.99, allow customers to wander the building’s 8,500 square feet and interact with the various exhibits. Many of the rooms are modeled on what a typical bank might offer, with a few twists. The teller is a fortune teller. In the Department of Fraud and Counterfeiting, forgery is encouraged. Joint Accounts is mostly a display of salt-and-pepper shakers. Tender is a chill out room filled with soft furnishings. A bird mascot is named S. Crow. There are pneumatic tubes and landlines throughout. The landlines ring with cryptic calls from performers or other visitors. A vault holds glass eyes, wooden hands, nail clippings, human teeth.
The space is designed as both a bank of human experience and an invitation to mystery, an opportunity to locate the wondrous in the everyday. And what could be more everyday than a trip to the bank? Unless of course this particular bank includes a disturbing statue of a pig in a bathtub, recurring motifs of rabbits, eyes, pigs, women with chicken feet. Even the very real toilets are in on the absurdist action. They will thank you for your deposit as you flush.
William Martin and Violet Whitney, who together run Spatial Pixel, a research and design studio, created several exhibits for the space, including the giant nose and a top-floor space in which visitors illuminate a Saligman mural through their words and actions. Designing for the Ministry of Awe has provided particular challenges. In that upper space, the Heavens, a telescope was being rejiggered after ticket holders had handled it with perhaps too much enthusiasm. “We’ve learned a lot about how people interact with these instruments, so we’re redesigning the interaction model to be more accommodating of curiosity,” Martin said.
Much of the work is deliberately experimental and will evolve as visitors interact with it and as certain exhibits are switched out for others. “This bank will not survive without account holders,” Saligman said. “We need you.”
In the meantime, the bank is eager to open new accounts, to raise interest, to lend delight and to encourage its customers to pay attention, preferably together.
“I hate to say what other people need,” Saligman said, “but just experiencing some humanity together would be the one thing I would infuse into our lives right now.”
