This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Rabbits appear frequently at the New York Botanical Garden. The one that the public will soon see there, however, isn’t a typical little brown cottontail. About 12 feet tall, this creature will hold a pocket watch and have fur made of cream-colored Sedum foliage, a waistcoat of yellowy-green Sedum and a maroon jacket of Alternanthera leaves.
But he’s not late for a very important date. Created by the Canadian company Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, this White Rabbit will be right on time for the festive May 18 opening of “Wonderland: Curious Nature,” an exhibition inspired by Lewis Carroll’s books “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.”
What visitors will find, the garden’s staff hopes, is their own adventure.
In the exhibition, “you’re caught out and drawn into something that’s out of your ordinary experience,” Jennifer R. Gross, the show’s guest curator, said during a behind-the-scenes visit with the project’s creative team. For adults as well as children, she added, the spectacle offers “a lot of different moments, where they can hopefully get pleasantly unsettled.”
That pleasant unsettling will occur indoors and outdoors at this Bronx public garden, as the exhibition explores Carroll’s fictional and real worlds through fantastical plants, Victorian artifacts and modern artworks.
Overlooking the Rockefeller Rose Garden, Yoko Ono’s large-scale interactive chess set, “Play It by Trust” (1966/2011), recalls the living chess pieces in “Through the Looking Glass,” but its all-white form makes competitive play virtually impossible.