The Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan opens to redefine possibilities for a modern galleries
Manhattan, Kansas, The Little Apple, has created a museum that even the Big Apple does not yet have.
When the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) opened, it became the nation’s first museum dedicated to digital, immersive fine art. Though the three-story museum contains halls of traditional art, its permanent galleries of experimental, light-projected shows seek to expand our understanding of what art is, how it is created, and how it can be experienced.
“We wanted a museum that embraced 21st-century technology throughout all of the exhibitions and one that provided visitors with an engaging experience,” museum director Erin Dragotto explained.
You’ll Know It When You’re in It
The crown jewel of this new museum is the first-floor Mezmereyz (The Mez) gallery, 21,500 square feet of open space that uses 108 Epson projectors and a massive media server to immerse visitors in an artist’s creations, life, natural environment and sense of place.
The opening exhibit, “Renoir: A Luminous Evolution,” rotates through 300 of the artist’s works, plus family photos and snatches of films to present the artist’s home, life, travels, artistic passions and evolution in an enfolding visual panorama. The floor is transformed into cobblestones; landscapes move in the wind; Renoir’s paintings and portraits are given cultural context and dimension.
Sydney Bouhaniche, the museum’s creative director of immersive exhibitions, explains that his goal was to “craft an experience that goes beyond art appreciation … that allows each visitor to feel as if they are traveling through time.”
Bouhaniche added a soundtrack of music and environmental sounds for what he describes as an “essential element” that “enhances the realism and emotional depth of the environment.”
Most visitors to the Renoir exhibit will have seen paintings by the artist online, in books, a classroom, or in various world museums. But the Mez gallery experience allows visitors to appreciate how each painting is a small piece of a larger whole. The immersive depth of the gallery adds new understanding to the multiple layers and connections of an artist’s life and work, and it makes the art accessible to those who may not know anything about Renoir. You do not need prior knowledge to have a rich experience.
Elevating Digital and Fine Art
The museum’s second floor houses the De Coded Digital Gallery, an entire gallery to collect and display digital art permanently. The opening exhibition, “Code and Canvas: Defining Digital Art in the Age of Blockchain,” features five internationally recognized digital artists of widely different styles: Erick “Snowfro” Calderon, Tyler Hobbs, Sasha Stiles, Emily Xie, and Grant Yun.
Any art form can be mind-juggling and edgy, especially for newcomers. And with digital art, we are all newcomers to a degree. Only the very youngest of us have grown up surrounded by it. So, in this hall, you might find yourself requiring some time and thought, even adjusting your body to change your line of sight, perhaps to better see what a particular artist is attempting. You may want to google some of the terminology used in descriptions. This is art that requires engagement, as the experience is not just in viewing but in reacting. To expand the engagement, the gallery features stations where visitors of all ages, can experiment with constructing and creating digital art.
The third floor gallery, “Lasting Impressions,” feels more familiar. It contains art produced through what we traditionally see as the tools of art: canvases, brushes, oils, pencils, watercolors, clay, metal, cloth, and more. And it includes works by internationally acclaimed artists such as Miro, Chagall, Matisse, Picasso and more. But these works are just a peek at the broader collections of the founders, long-time Manhattan community members Tracey H. and Robert L. DeBruyn, Ronald Bowman and Stanley E. Zukowfsky.
The third floor also houses a standard of art galleries—a really good café. Café Azul, operated by Radina’s, offers coffee, pastries and lunch options. Near the café, a terrace offers sweeping views. From here, the city itself feels like a canvas that changes with each passing cloud.
Why Digital Art? Why Not Just ‘Normal’ Art?
Digital art is much more than a trend. Art is constantly in flux—and digital is an essential part of the future of art. Digital art is something our kids and grandkids may appreciate, understand and engage with more than traditional art. Many new movements in art, from photography to performance art, have initially been dismissed as “not real art.”
So, Manhattan is embracing this genre head-on, tremendously and impressively, in an agrarian state that is also an art state—with no contradiction between those two identities.
According to the American Alliance of Museums, only 26% of museums in the United States are in rural areas. The Museum of Art + Light defies that statistic—to connect the Flint Hills and fine art in a multimedia experience dramatically different from strolling from one canvas on a wall to another.
Visitors may leave this new museum with an improved understanding of how much we do not understand about technology or how it functions in the lives and minds of our children and adolescents. Perhaps the exhibit even offers a taste of what our parents or grandparents felt, about 70 years ago, at the “miracle” of seeing people move on a screen in their living rooms. Or how some of us felt when first trying to understand cyberspace or what it meant when told we needed more cloud storage for our laptop files.
And that’s fine. The art will still be there for us when we return to immerse ourselves again.
For some, it may take a few visits to comfortably engage with some of the digital exhibits. But it will only take five minutes in Mezmereyz to find your jaw has dropped and your eyes are moving up and down. You’ll want to sit down in order to take it all in.
And that, perhaps, is the entire point. In Mezmereyz, you are not just seeing art, you are transported into art.
