Make Bank

Overview

For a brief time during the 2023 Fringe Festival, guests are invited to join a band of currency-crazed visual and performing artists as they occupy The Manufacturers’ National Bank in Old City. Closed to the public since 1985, this space has been transformed into the den, cave, and sewer of Meg Saligman and her newest four-story mural. Come experience the intersection of art-making and currency with Brother Can You Spare a Dollar?, where guests can steal, barter or bring a dollar bill and turn it into an art piece; or experience This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Jewelry, an opportunity to make trinkets for the giant that lives in the basement. Who knows, when the bank reopens in 2024, your pieces might be on permanent display in their larger- than-life-sized music box. At night, Meg, along with Lillian Ransijn and Dylan Smythe of R&T, will guide guests through the space filled with video installations and zany characters like “The Teller” and “The Butoh Financier,” a dancer who will emerge to welcome guests into a land of fetish, finance, and bijouterie-burlesque.

Lillian Ransijn and Dylan Smythe, Devising and Artistic Consultants

Gallery Experience
Sept 16, 17, 23 + 24 from 1–3:30pm
Sept 20 + 27 from 6–9pm
Pay What You Wish

About the Artist

For the past 30 years, Meg Saligman has created large-scale public artworks worldwide,
including some of our nation’s largest murals. Though she has created works across the USA
and internationally, Saligman’s seminal murals in Philadelphia are considered a catalyst for the
contemporary mural movement. With a focus on community engagement, collaboration, and
facilitating social exchange in pursuit of shared experience, Saligman consistently amplifies
local culture in her designs and the communities she works within. She seamlessly combines
both the classical and the contemporary using paint, glass, light, and people to give new life to
existing architecture. In addition to her iconic murals, Saligman takes on the same challenging
subject matter in her temporary and permanent architectural installations.

Meg painted Philadelphia’s landmark Common Threads for Mural Arts Philadelphia at Broad
and Spring Garden Streets. Other well-known works in her native city include Philadelphia
Muses, Perspective and Perception in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 2014,
and Passing Through, seen daily by a hundred thousand motorists on Interstate 76.

Highlights from the past decade include public installations for Pope Francis’ visit to
Philadelphia in 2015 and for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 2016.
Additionally, in 2015, Saligman and her team produced a 42,000+ square foot mural in
Chattanooga, Tennessee that highlighted the city's complex racial and cultural dynamics.

Saligman’s work has been featured by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York
Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Public Art Review, the Today Show, and numerous others.
She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Council
for the Arts. She has received the Moore College of Art & Design Visionary

Credits