WNDR Museum, Chicago’s ever-evolving, immersive art and technology experience, reopened to the public last Friday with brand-new interactive art, touchless experiences, and enhanced safety measures.  

Joining the city's only Infinity Mirror Room by Yayoi Kusama are some 20+ new exhibits including FLUX ROOM, a multi-sensory, 360°immersive experience curated byS̶A̶N̶T̶IA̶G̶O̶X, a Chicago-based Indigenous Futurist, that uses artificial intelligence, sounds, visuals and scents.

An installation called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord invites guests to participate in a virtually humming choir that is powered by the number of people around the world listening to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at any given minute.

Another new highlight is artist and social activist Keith Haring’s Untitled (FDR NY) #23 and #24 which went on display outside the West Loop location (1130 West Monroe) for the public to enjoy as the artist intended.

Honoring his desire to make art available for everyone, the WNDR Museum has brought Haring's work to public view. The mural is a 40" x 204" set of two metal panels that Haring spray enamel painted on a stretch of FDR highway in 1984 New York City as dated on the work. Chicagoans passing by will be able to enjoy the original featuring Haring's iconic spray-painted animations.  

Created in situ on a pre-existing fence, the mural ran along nearly 300 feet of the highway in a unique continuous frieze. Haring said that “The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ‘self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses…I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.” 

Now Haring’s work will again be a public experience outside of the WNDR Museum and a part of the rich history of public art in Chicago.