While settling in Manhattan after moving from Israel in 2004, the 24-year-old artist Roy Nahum decided to take on a second challenge: Inspired by his grandmother who had lost her sight and looking for new inspiration for his artwork, he blindfolded himself. For the next 168 hours, he felt adrift in his East Village apartment and used a cane to navigate to and from the nearby grocery store.
This experience of being immersed in the sounds and chaos of a new city helped inspire the exhibits in his new immersive installation, Mercer Laboratories. It opened for preview in January in a 36,000-square-foot space in an elegant Brutalist-style building at 21 Dey Street – the site of the former Century 21 department store.
Nachum, whose artwork often incorporates Braille, became known for this designing the Grammy-nominated cover art for Rihanna’s “Anti” album; with a photo of Rihanna as a child wearing a golden Braille crown. He and real estate developer Michael Cayre founded Mercer Labs with an ambitious mandate: to be a “place where traditional hierarchies between art, architecture, design, technology and culture dissolve” and where “diversity and inclusion are celebrated,” in a press release type. The site is expected to officially open on March 28.
The founders tout Mercer Labs as a “museum of art and technology.” It currently contains 14 exhibition spaces that use high-tech projectors, digital screens, LED lights and sound systems to display Nachum’s thought-provoking creations. Some exhibits feature Braille, touch screens, and immersive audio for the blind and visually impaired as well as the sighted. In one of the rooms, sighted attendees can don sleep masks and listen to a series of immersive sounds, the better to understand Nachum’s 2004 experiences with touch and navigation. In yet another area, visitors stroll through a grotto covered in pink hydrangeas that can be explored by touch.
Nachum’s facility is visible right now, but when Mercer Labs officially opens in March, Nachum and Cayre intend for it to become a multi-purpose site, with exhibitions by other artists, musicians and even actors. event spaces that can be rented for private use; and showcases high-profile fashion brands as well as up-and-coming New York companies. They would not specify which specific brands or artists they have worked with, citing non-disclosure agreements.
“It’s really much more than an immersive space,” Cayre said. “We’re actually working to work with many, many different luxury brands in the market to actually take the space and with the push of a button, we can change the entire content of the museum to be whatever brand we want for that moment. »
Born in Jerusalem in 1979 to a painter father and a kindergarten director mother, Nachum grew up painting. When he was a child, his grandmother developed a rare debilitating disease that left her weak and blind—a traumatic experience that Nachum says helped inspire the use of Braille in his artwork.
He eventually moved to the United States to study art at Cooper Union. After graduating, he began selling his art on the streets of New York, until he was introduced to Rihanna, who commissioned a series of Braille paintings, including his now famous album cover. This image became one of Nachum’s signature designs and appears repeatedly in Mercer Laboratories.
Cayre is an art collector and ultra-wealthy real estate developer whose family owns Midtown Equities, an investment firm with more than 100 properties in New York, Washington, DC and elsewhere.
The two met in Soho through a mutual acquaintance, and Cayre collected some of Nachum’s work. They later traveled together to Tokyo, where they visited the famous immersive installations created by Japanese art technology collective teamLab, which inspired them to consider leading the rapidly evolving immersive experience trend. In the United States, it included Meow Wolf, with headlines in Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Denver, and Superblue, opening in Miami in 2021. (Predecessors include James Turrell’s Skyspace and Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field”, back to 1965.) The pandemic affected business investors, but dips have proven to be globally resilient.
Originally, Nachum and Cayre planned to open their site in Brooklyn, but the pandemic put the project on hold. When Century 21, in the Financial District, went bankrupt, Cayre drew up a plan for a $35 million renovation of the property.
Cayre and his family remain the main financial backers of Mercer Labs, and say it has sold more than 50,000 tickets since it launched in January. (Adult tickets are $52; student, senior and youth fees are $46.)
Beyond working with luxury brands, Nachum also hopes to collaborate with other artists, musicians, poets, actors and architects. A private Mercer Labs space features an art studio with 3D printers and computers, as well as oil paints, chalk, canvases, and other physical and digital art tools. New exhibits will arrive at Mercer Labs in May, June and July, including one focused on poetry.
“For me it’s about creating a movement,” Nachum said.
On a Thursday in January, Nachum, who has curly brown hair and wore a black jumpsuit, appeared at the entrance of Mercer Labs to give a reporter a tour. His demeanor was serious as he showed off the first installation, a circular room called The Window, in which visitors put plastic covers over their shoes and a screen above shows an undulating object that looks like a misshapen shell.
The next room, a 5,000-square-foot space with 40-foot ceilings, uses 26 projectors to display shifting, distorting images from Nachum’s artwork: a giant bird flapping its wings, a waterfall of flower petals, a person wearing a crown with Braille written on it.
Many of the Braille messages make lofty statements: “All men are born equal in dignity and rights,” reads one.
“Braille is a recurring motif in my work, a tribute to the visually impaired, whether tactile or through light. From a source of light is a metaphor and a tool for creating awareness,” Nachum wrote in an email.
“I wanted to make work that spoke to equality,” she said. “Because everyone deserves to experience art and visual art.”
Some of the Braille messages are displayed on screens that are not accessible to the blind or are projected onto the floor. Some advocates for the blind say this use of Braille is exploitative and can perpetuate harmful stereotypes of the blind.
“Blindness is a complex human experience and not an appropriate vehicle for metaphors about ignorance or perception,” said Chancey Fleet, president of Assistive Technology Educators Section of the National Federation of the Blind. “While I’m always excited to see authentic representations of the blind and Braille in art, using Braille as a device to produce a hard-to-read experience is a cheap trick and does the blind community no favors.”
According to Mercer Laboratories Website, the image of a child wearing a golden crown “symbolizes the ‘blindness’ born of displaced values and desires.” But associating blindness with negative ideas can be problematic, he said Cheryl Fogle-Hatchresearcher with New York University’s Ability Project.
“To me, blindness is a certain physical characteristic,” he said. “It’s the way I experience the world. It is the way I will always experience the world. It has nothing to do with my moral behavior.”
Nachum said he has worked with the visually impaired for two decades and has worked with Guild of Lighthouses, an organization that provides services for the blind. He also referred to a series of five collective paintings that were introduced in 2023 by Mayor Eric Adams of New York at City Hall Rotunda, in which he painted portraits of blind people and then invited them to paint over the portraits. These paintings will be exhibited in a new exhibit opening soon at the Mercer.
He said he recently installed signs in front of each exhibit that provide descriptions in Braille.
“We built this museum so that anyone and everyone can experience art,” he said. “You can touch anything.”
Already, Mercer Labs has created a buzz on social media, with more than 30,000 followers on its Instagram account. On a recent Saturday, attendees spent much of their time on their phones snapping photos of the exhibits or posing for photos. With its twinkling, colorful lights, multiple mirrors, and eerie imagery, Mercer Labs feels designed for virality on TikTok and Instagram.
The exhibit that has generated some of the most buzz online is the Dragon Room mirror, in which more than 500,000 tiny LED lights, controlled by a sophisticated computer program, hang from the ceiling. Blinking, constantly changing, they create what Nachum calls “volumetric lighting,” or the sensation of walking through a hologram.
In another exhibit, visitors can type a wish into a computer and then enter a space with a series of tubes that send out their wish, symbolized by a brightly lit object that zooms around the room.
Immersive installations like the Mercer Workshops are often more about using technology to create something visually striking than about showcasing specific artists, said Sarah Rothberg, an assistant professor of art at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
“It’s all about the spectacle and taking a picture while you’re in it,” he said.
Parth Patel, 28, and Sonia Sabade, 29, visited Mercer for their one-year anniversary as a couple after finding out about it on TikTok. They left admiring some of the displays.
“It was very sensory, with sound, light, even fog and texture experiences,” Sabade said. “Now I understand why they call them immersive experiences.”