21c Museum Hotel properties are just as much museum as they are hotel, emphasizes co-founder Steve Wilson, in Chicago recently with CEO Craig Greenberg to formally open its newest location in the former James Hotel. The hotels require a bigger footprint to showcase the art – the first two floors of the Chicago property were gutted to ensure there was enough space – which is curated and changes regularly among the eight other open properties.
The Chicago exhibit, whose theme is dedication and allegiance, is new, but “everything you see today will be gone in eight or nine months,” Wilson said, to be replaced with other pieces from the collection.
HOTELS: How does the art change the energy of the hotel?
SW: I think our openness and acceptance of all people, all colors, all notions is evident. It’s on the wall. So, it gives people permission to be who they are, talk about things that they may not have felt comfortable about before, and feel comfortable working here. We’re not only working here but coming here as a guest.
H: The art is inherent in your identity as a hotel, but it’s also part of your business model. How does that work?
CG: I think that people are looking for unique experiences. The unique experience that we offer our guests is an immersive, innovative, world-class contemporary art experience, whether it’s enjoying the exhibits that are on the walls or the art programming, along with great food and beverage and a great hotel room.
SW: So many people use the word modern art in an incorrect way, don’t know the difference, but we try and make a point about contemporary art that it is art of the day, living artists, and they’re documenting our times.
H: The impetus to open the original 21c in Louisville was community revitalization. What did you do in Louisville that you understood could be replicated elsewhere?
SW: We really had a lot of naysayers in Louisville when we first started talking about this idea, and no one thought it would work – contemporary art in Louisville, Kentucky, but it works so well that people in other communities ask us if we would come there and do that for them… But it worked even better than we could have dreamed.
When we started, we didn’t know what we were doing. I like to say it’s easy to break the rules when you never knew what the rules were, but the first building we bought was too small. We ended up putting five separate historic buildings together to have enough space for the rooms and exhibition, and four of those five buildings were vacant when we started. And since then it really has sparked economic development in that area. And I love it because my dad told me when I was a kid that art was worthless. I didn’t think about that till recently, that we’ve been proving him wrong ever since.