Historic Old City bank building to become artistic fantasia in March

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The creator of a permanent, immersive art experience inside a 19th-century bank building in Philadelphia’s Old City has announced an opening date: “The Ministry of Awe” will open March 14.

The Manufacturer’s National Bank building on Third Street is still in a raw state of renovation. It was designed in 1870 by architect Frank Furness when he was a young partner in the firm Frasier, Furness and Hewitt.

Artist Meg Saligman, known for several murals around Philadelphia, acquired the building to turn it into a multi-media art experience where audiences will be invited to wander its five floors at will.

“In one way it’s a cozy bank, and another way it is a lot to explore,” Saligman said. “Many staircases, many winding paths, a large atrium, the heavens. Don’t forget the heavens are here.”

The so-called heavens are the ceiling of the five-story atrium with original mouldings that Saligman has turned into a sky-blue mural of fanciful imagery.

What does the mural represent?

“That’s a good question,” Saligman said. “I call it the Sistine Chapel mural. On the top floor, the bank itself will peel away to reveal, perhaps, our imaginations.”

Saligman said over 100 local artists are working on the 8,500-square-foot space, contributing paintings, sculpture, virtual reality and performance art. She contracted the Pig Iron Theatre company to train performers for a variety of interventions and audience interactions.

The rooms will be thematic, taking on terms gleaned from the banking industry and deconstructing them into abstract concepts. Audiences will be prompted to ponder things like value, security, fraud and surveillance.

Every square foot of the building will be available for discovery, including easter eggs that suggest a backstory or a mystery to be pieced together.

“The Ministry of Awe, as an example, has a full board of trustees. They call themselves a pantheon,” Saligman said. “You can find them through books, desks, artwork. There will be lots of clues as to what really is going on.”

“The Ministry of Awe” is inspired by other immersive art experiences, such as New Mexico’s Meow Wolf which has spread nationally, and Otherworld in Northeast Philly. Saligman said this one will be unique because of its specificity, in a historic bank building designed by Frank Furness in Old City.

“I’ve never known one to be site specific and grown from the community,” she said. “We’ve intentionally situated it in America’s most historical mile so that we can have some very Philly conversations going on in the building,” she said.

“The Ministry of Awe” is nearly exactly between the 18th-century Second Bank of Philadelphia building in Independence National Historical Park and the Philadelphia Mint. The Second Bank will reopen next year as a museum of American economic history, while the Mint attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to see contemporary currency being made.

In between those pillars of the past and present, the Manufacturer’s National Bank will represent a banking fantasia, exploding concepts of value and transaction into an aesthetic realm.