Photoshoot of Woman on the Run at 21c Hotel and Museum

All photographs are courtesy of the 21c Hotel Museum and All rights reserved by BrainSpark Media

21c Main Entrance

Walking into the 21c

Lobby Gallery from Check-In area

Looking down the Lobby Gallery

Inside the Motel Room

Wide View of Motel Room with Dresser and TV

The Alley

View of The Alley from Proof on Main

Feature: 21c's Director, William Morrow.

Reposting this great article by Elizabeth Kramer of Louisville's Courier-Journal about William Morrow, Director of 21c's Musuem. William is seen below, photographed inside the "Woman on the Run" motel room.

 

November 22, 2010 Photo by Matt Stone, The Courier Journal 21c art wrangler extraordinaire: Hotel job keeps William Morrow hopping By Elizabeth Kramer ekramer@courier-journal.com 21c Museum Hotel has defied definition since it opened in 2006. It's a hotel. It's a gallery. It's a restaurant. It's open 24 hours a day. And it has received accolades for its art and its hospitality. That makes director William Morrow more than a busy man.  Morrow, 32, along with owners Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown, manages all the art and arts-related activities at 21c, and that covers a lot of ground. A few weeks ago, Morrow was on the hotel's rooftop setting up equipment for a film screening by the Louisville Film Society. Back inside, he was managing a change of exhibitions in the galleries. Morrow and Wilson curated the outgoing show, an exhibit of photographs and sculptures by Simen Johan called “Until the Kingdom Comes,” selecting works from the 21c collection and securing other pieces through loans from galleries and other private collections. As that came down, Morrow was working with artist Tracey Snelling to coordinate the installation of her sprawling piece, called “Woman on the Run.” This exhibit, with its film noir influence and an architectural landscape of buildings incorporated with photography and other media, essentially meant setting up a motel in the hotel's lobby. “One day I'm up on a ladder working on a projector, but also thinking about interpreting art at 21c,” Morrow said. Morrow is busy, but he likes it that way. He enjoys the diversity of his job even more. And keeping up with all of those tasks is exactly what Wilson expects from his director. “It's a variety of things he helps us do, including documenting the collection and keeping up with the values and the trends,” Wilson said. “And he keeps up with upcoming shows and the museum shows around the country and the world.” Morrow, a Louisville native, met Wilson and Brown nearly 10 years ago, after he graduated from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland with a master's degree in art history and English literature.  Morrow went to work for Wilson and Brown at their home in Goshen. Their art collection was growing fast, and keeping track of the contemporary work the couple had assembled inspired him. He went back to Europe and enrolled in the graduate program in museum studies at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain.  Through that program, he got to work at museums and handle pieces by Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. While working with fellow students to curate an exhibit of heroes and villains, he began to explore the collection of Latin American art at Essex University. “And I discovered, literally, in this broom closet, this 6-foot-by-6-foot painting by Raúl Martínez, one of the most famous pop artists from Cuba,” Morrow said. If he wasn't hooked on museums already, that sealed the deal. Morrow wrote his dissertation on the role of the benefactor in American art. Morrow researched the institutions set up by philanthropists during the Gilded Age of the late 1880s through the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. He documented how corporations become involved in supporting art in the latter part of the 20th century — and how that support waned as the year 2000 approached. That provided Morrow with a historical perspective on the evolving idea of supporting visual art when he moved home to Louisville in fall 2005. At that time, “21c was on the front burner and in full swing.” He hooked up with Wilson and Brown right away, as they were preparing for their spring 2006 debut as hoteliers-cum-gallerists. Morrow sees Wilson and Brown's venture — which now includes developing other 21c Museum Hotels in Cincinnati, Bentonville, Ark., and possibly Austin, Texas — as a new and much-needed way of making visual art accessible to the public. “Most of my colleagues (at traditional museums) are constantly doing capital campaigns to sustain themselves,” he said. “Most traditional museums seem so static because they are so separated from real-life scenarios. And I do think there's a place for that, because there is definitely a need for places of contemplation, and that's what some of the more traditional museums are better at.” The primary challenge at 21c, he said, is not financial but the result of the Main Street building's architectural limitations. The experience here has proved instructive, he said, as the 21c design team develops the new properties. Reaching out Morrow has expanded his role by reaching out to other arts groups in the community, such as the film society.  That partnership led to a film series that has brought movies to 21c for 36 consecutive months. There is the 21c Monthly Poetry Series with Sarabande Books, the acclaimed Louisville-based literary press, and a regular Sunday event called Cabaret Life Drawing. It provides interesting models for anyone who wants to come and practice drawing. There's also Yoga with Art, where yoga students can practice among 21c's artworks. Molly Swyers, who works with Morrow on publicity and marketing efforts, credits him with making 21c more of a cultural center. “When we first opened 21c, I don't think anyone involved saw the potential for it to become a cultural center for the community,” she said. “William really took it upon himself to develop relationships and collaborate with many other organizations in this community to create opportunities for people to have these cultural experiences.” Expansion beckons Looking back on the last five years, Morrow called himself lucky to have the opportunity to have such a novel job in his hometown. “I'm not coming from a restaurant or a hotel background, so the learning curve there has been tremendous,” he said. “But being able to be in on the 21c development from the design phase has been fascinating — to see how a restaurant gets started, and how the hotel came to fruition, and being a part of Steve and Laura Lee's collection before 21c.”  Wilson feels fortunate, too.  “We're lucky to have someone like him who happens to be from Kentucky and is well educated in the field that we are so involved with,” Wilson said. “The scope of our collection has grown, and when we first began collecting, we didn't even know we were going to be doing 21c. And as our collection has increased, William's been able to keep up with the pace.” With what is planned for Louisville's 21c and the opening of others across the country, Wilson said, he sees Morrow keeping very busy over the next few years. Reporter Elizabeth Kramer can be reached at (502) 582-4682. http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20101122/SCENE05/311220009/21c-art-wrangler-extraordinaire-Hotel-job-keeps-William-Morrow-hopping

21c's film about Woman on the Run, with the artist.



Tracey Snelling "Woman on the Run" Interview at 21c .

Woman on the Run at 21c

The Producers at the 21c Museum Hotel

From the LEO Weekly 

http://leoweekly.com/ae/art-motel-mystery?ref=nf

Setting up 21c

A collection of select images from the first to last days of installing the show. Enjoy the behind-the-scenes views of what it takes to put this fascinating art installation together, and the many layers which make it so interesting.


Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Last Day

Smack Mellon is pleased to present Tracey Snelling’s installation Woman on the Run. Snelling uses architectural elements and multimedia effects to create fictional character and scenarios full of intrigue. In the tradition of a film noir femme fatale, Snelling constructs a three-dimensional narrative around an ambiguous female persona wanted for questioning in relation to a crime. The visitor becomes a player in the story, searching for the enigmatic woman. Boundaries blur between victim and violator, fact and fiction, feminism and outdated views.

Tracey Snelling

Woman on the Run

“Woman on The Run is an installation that intricately mixes architecture, scale modeling, video, photography and 3-D story telling with a heady dose of Hollywood glamour and Hitchcock-like built-in suspense. A multimedia project, Woman on the Run explores a fragmented narrative about a fated woman. The main character, a combination of heroines and femme fatales from 1950’s and 1960’s film noir is trying to escape her fate. A crime has taken place, and she is wanted for questioning. Throughout the installation, different clues are given about what might have happened and who the woman is. Is she the victim, or the perpetrator? A study in feminism or an example of outdated ideas?

An alternate world of shrunken buildings, neon signs, and a life size motel offer a selection of clues that conspire to initially draw the viewer to the action and then help them thread together the disconnected story that just happened. The viewer quickly becomes a witness and to some extent an actor within the story, often assuming the role of a detective. Video plays in windows and conversations can be overheard. Reality becomes based more in perception than in absolutes. The blacks and whites of life shift to grey, and the truth becomes shrouded in mystery.

I have been interested in the idea of reality being something that continually changes, due to perception and according to an individual’s ideals and own subjectivity. I explore this viewpoint through shifting scale and presenting a particular subject in a myriad of ways. A large building can inspire a small sculpture of that building, which in turns becomes a photograph and eventually gets incorporated into another piece of art. Video is often placed in the sculptures – usually of people, sometimes doing mundane activities, repeated continually. Other times the characters might remain the same but the actions that are repeated change slightly and contradict each other. Influences in my work are heavily anchored in Americana and fed by post-war US popular culture from literature to cinema, while my work consistently and simultaneously celebrates, demystifies and re-interprets those cultural clichés with the view to making them both timeless and fresh.”

Tracey Snelling is an internationally exhibiting artist living and working in Oakland, California. She graduated with a BFA in Art Studio from The University of New Mexico in 1996. She explores reality and scale through sculpture, photography, and video.  Her works are featured in numerous collections, including the Baltimore Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, de Saisset Museum, and The West Collection, Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Gemeentemuseum Helmond in the Netherlands, Selfridges in London, solo exhibitions in Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and Miami, and at Art Basel. She recently returned from a 4 month art residency and solo exhibition in Beijing.

This exhibition is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, Jerome Foundation and Smack Mellon’s Members.  Smack Mellon also receives generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recovery Act, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, City Council Member David Yassky and the New York City Council, Bloomberg, Brooklyn Arts Council JPMorgan Chase Regrant Program, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Google, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., Helena Rubinstein Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., The Robert Lehman Foundation, Tides Foundation, advised by Lambent Foundation, and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
 

Woman on the Run was funded in part by San Pablo Arts District Fund, Galerie Urs Meile, EAmmune, Osborne Samuel Gallery, Aeroplastics Contemporary, Pan American Art Projects and Jane Wattenberg. Woman on the Run was originally commissioned by and shown at Selfridges in London during Frieze in October 2008, with the help of Nine AM and Wedel Fine Art.
 

Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas Family and Two Trees Management.