| 21c Museum Hotel | |
|---|---|
| Location | Louisville, Kentucky |
| Address | 700 West Main Street |
| Opening date | 2006 |
| Rooms | 90 |
| Restaurants | 1 |
| Website | http://www.21chotel.com |
| References: [1] | |
21c Museum Hotel is a combination contemporary art museum and 90-room boutique hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Five historic 19th century tobacco and bourbon warehouse buildings were renovated to house the museum, hotel, and its restaurant. The restaurant and bar is named Proof on Main, and is located on the ground floor, while guest rooms and suites are situated on the upper stories. Contemporary art installations and exhibitions are integrated into public spaces throughout the facility.[2] In 2009, 21c Museum Hotel was voted the Top Hotel in the U.S. in the Condé Nast Traveler Readers' Choice Awards.[3]
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21c Museum Hotel was launched in 2006 by philanthropists and art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson. The pair had seen farmland and rural landscapes fall to development while the historic buildings of Louisville’s downtown sat vacant. They created 21c in Louisville’s downtown arts and theater district to support both urban renewal and regional agriculture, and have developed partnerships with local growers to supply produce and ingredients for the Proof on Main restaurant and bar.
On June 10, 2010, Brown and Wilson announced plans to build a new 21c hotel in Bentonville, Arkansas. This hotel is being developed in partnership with heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton.[4] The hotel is to be located on land that is currently a corn field outside of the urban center of Bentonville. The estimated cost of the project is $28 million. It is anticipated to open in 2012 and will bring an estimated 160 new jobs to the area, which are expected to be filled largely by contracted workers. The opening of the hotel is expected to cause Bentonville to lose half of its current hotel base. [5]
21c Museum is North America's only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century. The Museum is open free of charge 24 hours a day, seven days a week. More than twenty special exhibitions and installations have been organized by the 21c Museum since its opening in 2006.
Recent exhibitions include: “Creating Identity: Portraiture Today [1];” “All's Fair in Art and War: Envisioning Conflict;” “Tangled Up In You: Connecting, Coexisting, and Conceiving Identity,” and “Hybridity: The Evolution of Species and Spaces in 21st-Century Art.” 21c Museum has presented projects by Mikhail Baryshnikov and John Waters, as well as traveling exhibitions including Marc Swanson: Beginning to See the Light, organized by the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and Constant World: the Work of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, organized by Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine.
The 21c Museum features permanent installations and special exhibitions of works by artists, including Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, Andres Serrano, Sam Taylor-Wood, David Levinthal, Yinka Shonibare, Judy Fox, Chuck Close, Alfredo Jaar, David Herbert and Kara Walker.
The Museum also displays a number of original site-specific commissions, including:
Louisville is situated on the Ohio River on the Kentucky-Indiana border. 21c Museum Hotel is located within the city’s arts and theater district along “Museum Row,” which is home to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, the Muhammad Ali Center, Louisville Glassworks, the Frazier International History Museum, the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and the Louisville Science Center.
The buildings that house 21c Museum Hotel are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The facility was designed by Deborah Berke and Partners Architects [2].
Berke won the AIA New York Chapter Design Award in 2001 and was a finalist for the 2008 National Design Award for Interior Design, which is given by the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt Museum for exceptional and exemplary work in domestic, corporate, cultural interior design.
21c Museum Hotel’s restaurant, Proof on Main[3], was named one of “Best New Restaurants 2006” by Esquire magazine.[6] The menu features ingredients from local farms and food purveyors, as well as 50 types of bourbon.[7]
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