The Brooklyn Museum has recently unveiled Monet and Venice, New York’s largest museum exhibition to focus on Monet in over 25 years. Featuring over 100 works from Monet and contemporaries including John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the exhibition highlights 19 Venetian paintings by Monet and will run through February 1, 2026. Reflecting the artists’s unique journey of the “enveloppe” — addressing the unified impression of light and atmosphere — the featured works echo his fascination with repetition and the shifting qualities of time and reflection.
To prepare visitors for the journey, the Museum commissioned Hyperquake’s Experiences Team to transform its central rotunda into a multi-sensory prelude. The result: an immersive environment that embodies Monet’s “enveloppe” concept in extraordinary ways. Explains Hyperquake’s Experiential Creative Director Mary Franck: “Our goal was to immerse visitors in Venice so they could see what Monet saw and experience for themselves the play of light and color through the day, making the exhibit visceral and accessible to visitors.” This led the Hyperquake team to Venice-based videographer Joan Porcel Studio; together they created a five-minute panoramic video journey that transports viewers through a day from sunrise to sunset.
To envelope visitor within this evolving Venetian scenery, Hyperquake redesigned the rotunda’s physical space, including seating and wall placement. Projection-mapped across four freestanding walls — each over 10 feet tall — and two 24-foot rotunda projections, the theatrical experience also features caustic lighting animating the dome above, with rippling water patterns cascading across the floor. Heightening the multi-sensory experiences, through Hyperquake’s collaboration with the Museum’s former composer-in-residence Niles Luther, visitors hear a custom soundtrack layered with field recordings from Venice, which complements the exhibition’s original symphony. As a final stroke, a custom fragrance created by Joya Studio infuses the rotunda with atmospheric scent.
All of these touches combine to complete the sensation of standing at the edge of a canal or waterway in Venice. With Hyperquake leading the design and integration, while overseeing AV installation and projection studies to maximize impact, the result is an integration of physical and digital storytelling that invites visitors to experience the same interplay of sensations that captivated Monet during his time in Venice. “In short,” says Franck, “we’ve created a multi-sensory entry experience that contextualizes Monet’s Venetian works, deepening visitor understanding to ensure guests arrive in the gallery attuned to his artistic innovations.”
Lisa Small, Senior Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum, says: “I wanted to create an introductory moment in the exhibition that would transport visitors to Venice and surround them with the vistas, shimmering reflections, and magnificent architecture that enchanted Monet in 1908. We are thrilled with the final result, as is our audience, who are enjoying this meditative and beautiful environment as an integral prelude to Monet and Venice.”
Hyperquake has locations in Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Brooklyn, and Portland OR.
