A Bold Hour photo essay by Rosa Alemán, spotlighting a collaboration between Club9 and Bridgebold.
Last week, I had the opportunity to document an intimate gathering hosted by entrepreneur and Club9 member Sophy Wang, held inside the wildly vibrant Museum of Modern Renaissance (ModRen) in Somerville, Massachusetts. The event, titled Signal_001: (AI × Deeptech), was unlike any tech mixer I’d experienced. It was reverent, colorful, and soft. More than a professional gathering, it felt like a serendipitous creative encounter. And that feeling only deepened the more I learned about the space and the people gathered in it.
Club9 is a self-described home for the “lifelong curious.” It’s a community of scientists, creatives, deeptech founders, and polymaths gathered to nurture discovery and reflection outside the bounds of traditional networking. Designed to foster intimacy and mutual inspiration, Club9 events skip the panels and keynotes. Instead, members arrive ready to share ideas in more ambient, spontaneous ways. No name tags. No PowerPoints. Just music that inspires dance, warm connection, and open circles of generative conversation.
This is exactly what greeted me when I stepped into the ModRen. The museum’s cathedral-like structure pulsed with kaleidoscopic color. Its walls, ceilings, and beams felt alive with sweeping strokes of inspired art, layered with mystical symbolism. The space is the life’s work of co-founders Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina, the artistic duo painting in the style of “Mystical Realism.” Over decades, the married couple transformed this former Unitarian church into a living artwork. Each painted panel and every curving form seems to speak to both the heavens above and the soil beneath our feet.
I wandered through the enormous space with my camera, capturing moments of quiet awe and easy exchange. Club9 attendees drifted between clusters of conversation, soda water in hand, as silk-soft Hip Hop and R&B songs warmed the room. People swayed, laughed, and looked up in wonder—many of us visibly stunned by the sheer scale and color that surrounded us.
Then something unexpected happened: the museum’s event director approached me and offered a full tour of the space. I accepted without hesitation.
As we moved through the halls, he shared the museum’s calendar of events and snippets of its history. I learned that the building had once welcomed Paramahansa Yogananda, the pioneering yogi and author of Autobiography of a Yogi, who introduced yoga teachings to the American public in 1920. According to the ModRen website, this was the very place where Yogananda gave his first U.S. talk, officially bringing yoga to the West. I stood still, stunned by the convergence: here I was, photographing a next-gen salon of art, tech and life science innovators in the same space that had helped spark a century of American spiritual seeking.
The lower level of the museum held even more wonders: oversized furniture, sculptures, lush plants, and curious fixtures. Moving from room to room felt like wandering through a living organism.
The museum’s event director told me about the weekend yoga gatherings held here, where practitioners sit in near silence, surrounded by golden-orange murals and bathed in sunlight pouring through a semi-circular room of windows. He invited me to return during daylight, and I imagined it might feel like stepping into sunbeams and sitting with time itself.
Some stories only reveal themselves when you pay close attention to place. That’s something I’ve come to trust through Bridgebold. It’s a practice shaped by curiosity, by arriving open, and by allowing the story to unfold through people, texture, movement, sound and light. Being in that space, surrounded by thinkers and builders in conversation beneath murals filled with meaning and myth, reminded me why I pick up my camera. The Club9 gathering filled the room with ideas and connection. More than simply documenting a gathering, it felt like being in rhythm with something vivid and shared.
It’s rare to find a gathering that weaves disciplines with such creativity and ease. Rarer still is a place that holds both cultural and spiritual resonance—where creatives and researchers share ideas beneath murals of cosmic rebirth, and where the lineage of yoga and art continues forward through music, technology, and quiet reflection. The Museum of Modern Renaissance holds that kind of presence. Club9 brings that kind of community.
This event was an absolute delight to document. It reminded me how powerful it can be when place, people, and purpose align. Moments like these don’t just produce great photos; they shape how we imagine, connect, and build. I left the Museum of Modern Renaissance energized by the creative exchange, the warmth of Club9’s community, and the quiet invitation to keep looking closer. These are the stories I want to continue to tell, stories rooted in presence and possibility, where imagination becomes action and collective vision takes form. The seed is the moment. The bloom is the future we create from it.
What’s the last space you stepped into that stopped you in your tracks?
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