The 134-year-old Broker’s Building at 4th and Market Street has been the home for a number of businesses over the years, but nothing like its newest tenant — the WNDR Museum.
You might "wonder" just what it is. Pronounced "wonder," WNDR Museum's general manager Andy Grantz described it as an immersive art and technology experience.
What Grantz called the museum’s tagline underlines the untraditional descriptor. You’d be hard pressed to find any other museum that proclaims, "We are all artists."
“You’re encouraged to touch things, flip switches, explore, open doors, participate in the art," Grantz said.
There's several ways to participate in the WNDR experience — a number of screens direct your interaction with what’s on the screen.
On one, the interaction happens with one of several recognizable works of art. One features Frida Kahlo’s self portrait, the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's sunflowers.
In this museum, what is art and what is beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.
There is art that is not immersive, per se, such as a piece of a Keith Haring mural painted along FDR Drive in Manhattan in 1984. But the emphasis is definitely on interactive and immersive.
There is one room where the artist has imagined a pantheon of gods building their society. The eight minute presentation sees the society through to its destruction.
And there is one called "Inside Out," by Scottish artist Leigh Sachwitz. It’s a representation of a garden shed on her family’s property in Scotland. Through light and sound, Sachwitz imagines one of many powerful, quickly moving thunderstorms she witnessed from the shed as a child. Viewed from outside or inside the shed, it is an enrapturing, all consuming experience.
Like other museums, the WNDR Museum entertains, enlightens and educates, but perhaps more than anything, it lives up to its name — in sparking a sense of wonder.
