CINCINNATI, Ohio — When art collectors and preservationists Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson decided to open a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2006, the intent was to help revitalize the city by bringing contemporary art to an unconventional context and audience. Since then, their 21c Museum Hotel has grown to seven locations throughout the Midwest, each one hosting a different exhibition and contemporary art collection. Art is ensconced in every nook and cranny, from hallways and elevators to artist-designed rooms, and is accessible 24 hours a day.
A recent visit to the Cincinnati location was on par with a gallery or museum. Multiple rooms in the hotel are designed by artists, almost like staying in an immersive installation. Most recently, they’ve added the “Nightwatch Artist Suite,” created by artist Chris Doyle. The installation includes biomorphic images of trees, plants, and flowers printed on the walls, floor, and curtains and a searchlight projection that moves across the walls that cultivate an encompassing environment with a focus on the natural world. The hotel describes it as “equal parts Renaissance still life and Disney’s Fantasia,” but to me, Doyle’s design also evokes a jungle at night filtered through a lens of surrealism, accented by a large penguin sculpture by art collective Cracking Art. The “Nightwatch” video is part of a body of work by the animation artist. Each stay in the room also support’s Cincinnati’s art community, with a donation by 21c to ArtsWave, a local art nonprofit in the city.
Concurrently, the location’s temporary exhibition, Revival: Digging Into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow, on view through September, is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between the past and present, featuring artworks by Isaac Julien, Ebony G. Patterson, and Myrlande Constant, among others. Patterson’s installation “When the Land is in Plumage…” (2020) is a showstopper: a sculpture of a peacock covered in white flowers stands atop gold conch shells; strands of pearls trail behind it like the train of a wedding gown, connecting it to a multicolored, bejeweled tapestry on the wall. The stunning work evokes a fantastical garden, commenting on the role of the human hand in shaping nature and, subsequently, overtaking the natural world.
Another maximalist work, Constant’s tapestry “GUEDE (Baron)” (2020) revisits recurring themes in the artist’s oeuvre. The title refers to the guede, the family of spirits in Haitian Voodoo associated with ancestor worship. Incorporating both spiritual and everyday iconography, the drapo (ritual banner) collapses death, the afterlife, and the future in its complex imagery.
All of the art is striking to encounter outside of a traditional museum or gallery context; Alice Gray Stites, who oversees the curation for all of the locations, has worked with private collectors and nontraditional environments in the past and balances the public/private dynamic well. The concept of a museum hotel risks transforming art into decoration, but the rooms and exhibitions are too assertive to become background objects.
Editorial note: The author’s overnight stay at 21C was subsidized by the hotel.
