Skift Take
21c Museum Hotels answers mainstream demand for cultural, local and educational travel by adding to the quality of artistic discourse in mainstream America.
Alice Gray Stites will speak about how learning is becoming the new luxury at the Skift Global Forum on October 14 and 15 in Brooklyn, New York. See the complete list of amazing speakers and topics at this year’s event.
“Hybridity: The New Frontier” is an art exhibition at 21c Museum Hotel Louisville exploring the confluence of the organic natural environment and the advance of manufactured technoculture. The paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos are created by a collection of domestic and international artists who blur the line between tech and humanity.
According to 21c Museum Hotels: “Influenced by Romanticism and Surrealism, science and commerce, these artists envision how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era have generated the promise and peril of the digital age.”
No matter what you think of contemporary art, the themes behind exhibitions like Hybridity are relevant to everyone to some degree, with the power to connect art lovers and casual observers alike. That is the defining mission of 21c Museum Hotels, where locals and visitors in second tier cities can discuss contemporary art beyond the ivory towers of the cultural elites.
21c Museum Hotels presently operate in Louisville, Cincinnati, Durham, and Bentonville, with Lexington, Oklahoma, Kansas City, Nashville, and Indianapolis in development.
“Learning is the new luxury in today’s experience economy,” says Alice Gray Stites, chief curator at 21c Museum Hotels. “Learning is something that we all aspire to do, and it is far more desirable in our culture today where what is considered a luxury isn't about objects. It's about experiences.”
Each of the 21c buildings are a work of artistic expression themselves, including new adaptive reuse projects like the old city hall in Indianapolis. Steve Wilson, founder of 21c Museum Hotels, says the physical properties are designed as museums that promote movement through multiple connected spaces in non-linear fashion.
“21c is a hotel and a museum, and we design the facility for art,” explains Wilson. “We don’t use art as decoration.” Moreover, the art selected focuses on the present and the future. Wilson has some
