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 individual rooms with various themes, and is accessible 24 hours a day.
A recent visit to the Cincinnati location to see its current exhibition, Revival: Digging Into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow, on view through September, was on par with a gallery or museum. The show 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 its complex imagery.
Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai’s multi-part portrait “Eclipse” (2023) conveys a more personal narrative. It can be read as symbolic of erasure or coming into being: On the central panel, an embroidery depicts a bust of a woman of color; the threading becomes more dense, and thus the image more cohesive, as it gets closer to the top of her head.
All of the works are 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 works in Revival, and all the artworks on view, are too assertive to become background objects.
Editorial note: The author’s overnight stay at 21C was subsidized by the hotel.
