Projects at 21c Museum Hotels
21c Museum Hotels is a unique art space where anyone and everyone is welcome. The public gallery spaces are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and each of the nine 21c locations offers tours, talks, and cultural events throughout the year. In each city 21c engages with their cultural communities in exciting and thought provoking ways.
From April 2016-December 2021, as the Assistant Curator Amethyst worked closely with Museum Director and Chief Curator, Alice Gray Stites, on all of the exhibitions and programming across all 21c locations. Since 2016, 21c Museum expanded to include five new locations: 21c calls Louisville, KY; Cincinnati, OH; Bentonville, AR; Durham, NC; Lexington, KY; Oklahoma City, OK; Nashville, TN; Kansas City, MO; and Chicago, IL; home.
The exhibitions continue to grow in complexity and transform in scope as they travel to multiple 21c locations. As a key contributor on an executive team of five, overseeing a group of 18 museum professionals across nine cities, Amethyst managed the exhibition rotation calendar and managed the production of 20 rotating exhibitions each year across nine properties. This includes writing and editing exhibition labels, updating exhibition texts, and working with teammates on layouts and exhibition design.
In her role, Amethyst leveraged her experience in the not-for-profit and museum world to build and enhance relationships with outside organizations like the North Carolina Museum of Art, Click! Photography Festival, Louisville Photo Biennial, FotoFocus Cincinnati, Nashville Triennial, among others in each 21c city. She worked closely with the 21c marketing team to create initiatives that focused on the driving force of the 21c Museum hotel brand—the museum. To encourage consistent messaging about the art across all locations and departments, Amethyst masterminded and implemented a department wide Writing Style Guide to facilitate a unified museum voice across all exhibition and marketing texts.
During her time at 21c, Amethyst formalized the museum exhibition training for corporate and property teammates where 100% of all teammates have the opportunity to learn about the art. This includes giving tours of the exhibitions, researching and creating extensive, illustrated educational guides for continued education of the works on view, and even putting together rhyming scavenger hunts that can be used to explore the exhibitions in person or online. Amethyst worked closely with teammates at each property and in 2019, she oversaw public programming that brought in 26,000 people for events, tours, and parties across all 21c locations.
The Future is Female
The Future is Female is an exploration of identity and experience in contemporary feminist art. The slogan first appeared during the 1970s on a t-shirt designed for the first women’s bookstore in New York City. Today, what is “female” expands beyond fixed notions of gender and sexual identity; though fluidity is widely accepted, these artworks illuminate the struggle for equality and inclusion persists.
21c Durham (January 2020-May 2022)
21c Bentonville (December 2018-September 2019)
21c Cincinnati (November 2017-September 2018)
21c Louisville (November 2016-June 2017)
OFF-SPRING: New Generations
Rituals—religious and cultural, institutional and domestic—provide the thematic infrastructure for OFF-SPRING: New Generations. These sculptures, paintings, photographs, and videos employ iconographic imagery to explore the development of both personal and group identity, childhood, family, history, and gender politics. At home, at the wedding altar, or in the classroom; within the fantasy of childhood play or the familiarity of grown-up habit, these new, old narratives generate a spectrum of meditations on the contemporary construction of self and society.
21c Kansas City (June 2019-April 2022)
21c Lexington (July 2018-May 2019)
21c Oklahoma City (June 2017-April 2018)
Since April 2016, the exhibition 21c at 10: A Global Gathering has transformed, grown, split, and transformed again to create multiple exhibitions across several properties. The exhibition continues to transform and can be seen in exhibitions that are still traveling like Fragile Figures: Beings and Time and Hide and Seek: Projecting, Portraying, and Playing with Identity. Past versions of this exhibition include:
21c Durham
Portraying Power and Identity: A Global Perspective
(September 2018-January 2020)
21c Lexington
A Global Gathering
(August 2017-July 2018)
21c Cincinnati
A Global Gathering: The 21c Collection
(January-November 2017)
21c Louisville
21c at 10: A Global Gathering (April 2016-June 2017)
Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter
As civil strife, economic insecurity, and environmental crises proliferate, artists from across the globe explore the search for refuge—how, why, and where people need, seek, and create shelter. Fantasies and realities of centuries of human flow culminate in our contemporary condition: a world experiencing a massive refugee crisis in which borders are shrunk and shut, and routes to freedom and opportunity have shifted and narrowed into barriers. Narratives of travel and migration – both sought and forced – increasingly define the need for adaptation in a world dominated by disaster and dislocation, where survival may depend on human ingenuity, empathy, and acknowledging our shared vulnerability.
21c Bentonville (October 2019-January 2022)
21c Kansas City (July 2018-May 2019)
Seeing Now
“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” ― John Berger (1926-2017) Ways of Seeing
Seeing Now’s multi-media selection of artworks explores what and how we see today, revealing the visible and hidden forces shaping what the contemporary world looks like, how we consume and interpret that information, and how visual and psychological perception are evolving in the 21st century. Featured artists interrogate power, both hidden and overt, in the gulf of what is seen and known—between appearance and reality. The global pervasiveness of conflict has engendered the normalization of shock and numb; wanting to look but not to see, we lose sight. As many of these artworks reveal, we are disturbed by violent, unjust, or tragic incidents, yet accustomed to their regularity, and may be blind to their causes and costs, offering a choice: to see and engage with history, or to avoid it.
21c Oklahoma City (April 2019-February 2022)
21c Nashville (February 2018-January 2019)
21c Bentonville (February 2017-January 2018)
21c Cincinnati (April 2016-December 2016)
Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art
Superheroes and celebrities, totems and toys: the imagery of manufactured fantasy is reframed in the visual language of historical iconography in this multi-media exploration of popular culture nearly two decades into the 21st century. With unprecedented access to an audience of one’s own, we find affirmation onscreen, and venerate fame as a final destination. As the real and the virtual increasingly collide, boundaries between art and media further blur, inspiring new mythologies realized in new materials: stars of stage, screen, and sport are re-envisioned, offering insight into how desire shapes identity. Appropriating images and practices from commerce, science, politics, religion, sports, and technology, these artists illuminate recent shifts in how culture is being created and consumed.
21c Lexington (May 2019-November 2022)
21c Oklahoma City (April 2018-April 2019)
21c Louisville (June 2017-March 2018)
21c Bentonville (April 2016-February 2017)
Wim Botha: Still Life With Discontent
Wim Botha’s art is a study in contrasts: his pieces are simultaneously sacred yet profane, heavy yet light, and stable yet unsettled. Through his varying materials and subject matter, Botha explores weighty issues of history, status, power, and religion. A focus on art history is of particular prominence—the artist channels traditional sculptural busts and motifs, though Botha’s take on classical or conventional art history is blurred, deconstructed, or fractured. Neither “still” nor “content,” Botha’s forms and materials are dynamic, marked, and in motion. Repetitively interrogating the symbols and sources of religious, cultural, and political power, his works celebrate the anxiety of influence while resisting fixed interpretation
21c Bentonville (January-November 2022)
21c Louisville (March 2020-November 2021)
21c Durham (April-December 2019)
Truth or Dare: A Reality Show
Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare: A Reality Show emphasize the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by utilizing illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect, offering playful and prescient critiques of how and where we search for knowledge, meaning, or value. Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artists included in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials.
21c Bentonville (January-December 2022)
21c Louisville (March 2020-December 2021)
21c Cincinnati (September 2018-July 2019
21c Nashville (May 2017-February 2018)
Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia and Resistance
Bedecked and bejeweled, the figures populating Dress Up, Speak Up: Regalia and Resistance occupy fluid space and time, evoking past and present, fact and fiction, memory and desire, to illuminate the complexity of contemporary identity. Whether clad in the stylized garb of 18th or 19th-century Europe, the traditional coverings of ancient religious traditions, or the gender-bending bling of popular culture, these representations of self and other role-play in real time, reaching back through history to address prevailing personal, social, ad political challenges. This pantheon of provocative and prophetic personages are adorned to confront, transform, and redefine cultural identity.
21c Cincinnati (August 2019-June 2022)
21c Louisville (March 2018-March 2019)
21c Durham (September 2016-August 2017)
21c Lexington (January 2016-August 2016)
This We Believe
What are the costs and consequences of allegiance? This We Believe explores the power and evolution of belief systems—religious, political, economic—and how adherence to and rejection of these ideologies has influenced our current global culture of divisiveness and polarization. To truly expand definitions of identity and belonging, we might reconsider “E pluribus unum,” perhaps embracing the opposite notion: that out of one may come many—“ueniens multis”—and affirm the value of a plurality of perspectives on how we share and shape the future.
21c Chicago (February 2020-January 2022)
The SuperNatural
Landscape, once the realm of the bucolic and pastoral, now appears alluring and alarming, fantastical, threatening, and threatened, reflecting the earth’s evolution toward an Anthropocene: a planet whose contours and contents will be defined by human activity. This new world may contain hybrid territories, home to hybrid creatures who are the offspring of scientific speculation and artistic fantasy. In these still and moving images of land and cityscapes, and in the taxidermy and fabricated figures of The SuperNatural, nature meets technoculture, and the new natural is both organic and artificial. Invoking past and future in a critique of the present, these paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations document observed, current realities while referencing the aesthetic traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Influenced by Romanticism and Surrealism, science and commerce, these visions narrate how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era generated the promise and peril of the digital age, and explore the potential for adaptation to the visceral and virtual realities of the future.
21c Nashville (January-September 2019)
21c Durham (September 2017-September 2018)
Previously shown as Hybridity: The Supernatural
21c Lexington (September 2016-July 2017)
Labor & Materials
Exploring the evolution of industry in the 21st century, Labor&Materials presents a precarious balance between promise and peril. The scale, scope, and speed of technological innovation heralds unprecedented changes in what, how, where, and by whom goods and services are produced and provided. Economists describe the explosion of radically new platforms and products emerging in the digital age—automated labor, self-driving cars, three-dimensional printing, information transmitted across the internet, and the growing global network of trade driven by the shipping container—as an inflection point: a time in human history when how we live and work is utterly transformed.
21c Louisville (March 2019-March 2020)
21c Bentonville (January-November 2018)
21c Oklahoma City (June 2016-June 2017)