21C Museum Hotel - Lexington

167 W Main St, Lexington, KY 40507, United States

https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/lexington

21c Museum Hotel Lexington is an 88-room boutique hotel, contemporary art museum, cultural center and home to Lockbox restaurant. Woven into the fabric of downtown Lexington, 21c welcomes both visitors and the local community to enjoy the curated exhibitions and cultural programming.

21c Museum Hotel Lexington features solo and group exhibitions that reflect the global nature of contemporary culture. From the sidewalks to the lobby, there's art all around you, from Totally in Love, by Pieke Bergman, out on our front sidewalk to Spectralline, by SOFTlab, in the entrance. Specially commissioned, site-specific works by some of the contemporary art world's most exciting artists can be found throughout our downtown Lexington contemporary art museum and boutique hotel.

Exhibitions

Hide and Seek: Projecting, Portraying, and Playing with Identity

Who are you?  
Where do you come from?  
What do you desire? 

These age-old questions we pose to ourselves and to others resonate with heightened poignancy in a time when persistent global disruptions interrupt connections between and within communities and individuals. Hide and Seek: Projecting, Portraying, and Playing with Identity examines the evolution of portraiture as a platform for capturing how we construct and project our identities within the rapidly changing and precarious analog and digital worlds we inhabit.  

Formed both in reaction to lived and imagined experiences, the identities we conceive and share alternately shield or reveal our vulnerabilities. Social media, YouTube, blogs, and online forums provide unprecedented access to a vast array of cultural influences that inform contemporary portraiture. Paul Anthony Smith obscures the identity of the figure in Port Antonio Market #2, simultaneously disguising one part in order to reveal and release another; Christian Schoeler’s enigmatic portraits of friends and acquaintances capture emotion, embrace nostalgia, and expose human fragility; and Ain Cocke’s romantic painting of soldiers considers the complexities of masculinity and intimacy in times of war. 

In a constant state of projecting and connecting, how and what do we understand about ourselves and others? Dada Khanyisa’s triple portrait shows three people connecting—or not—over glasses of wine; one talks on the phone while another smokes a cigarette and looks out distractedly. At a time when innermost thoughts are shared with anyone and everyone on social media, and entirely new lives can be constructed and lived online, Joana Choumaliil’s mixed media embroidery works are like a “quiet diary.” Influenced by the urban light and environs of her early morning walks, Trapped Soul presents a young person several stories tall, leaning casually against a building as the light from their phone envelopes their entire face. Combining embroidery and collage on a digital photo, Choumali’s work captures the contradictions and the precarity of how we construct our identities and connect with others under current conditions.

Robert Morgan: Myths and Stories

Robert Morgan (born 1950) is a second-generation Kentucky artist who tells people's stories through his artwork. Since childhood he has assembled, reassembled, and transformed discarded treasures, curious objects, recyclables, broken toys, electronics, and sentimental souvenirs into what the artist describes as “speaking cultural artifacts.” Morgan’s exhibition at 21c Museum Hotel Lexington includes multiple bodies of work created over the span of his decades-long practice.