The 21c Museum Hotel (1528 Locust Street) is home to beautifully crafted pieces of art, including its well-known immersive staircase, its crew of orange penguins, its upstairs museum with rotating exhibits and the billiards room, which is currently hosting the Elevate at 21c art exhibit.
Elevate at 21c showcases the work of St. Louis artists, highlighting the depth of visual culture in the ever-changing city. Currently, photographers Tiff J. Sutton and Michael Eastman have work on display in the billiards room, where it will remain until the end of June.
“The Elevate program switches out every six months; this is our second one since we opened in August,” says Museum Manager Angie Villa. “For these past two shows, I’ve worked with our chief curator, Alice Gray Stites, to select a couple of artists and work with them to put together the space.”
When walking through the exhibit, not only does the artists’ work contrast beautifully with the dark, rich wood-paneling of the room, but with each other’s art as well. The two each depict human energy in their photographs, but Sutton keeps her subjects front and center while Eastman’s work creates more of an absent feeling.
Sutton is a portrait photographer whose work is characterized by the Black gaze, dual perceptions and unique landscapes by placing Black femininity at the forefront through complex, layered images and introspective portraits.
“She’s centered her figures and she’s very much allowed them to take up almost the entire frame,” says Villa. “She has been photographing exclusively Black women for a while now. She’s really interested in presenting her subjects in various facets of their personalities through her photography. Her photo sessions are longer; she’s really working to make them feel comfortable and create this really intimate setting with her figures, and then she’s presenting these non-monolithic subjects that this person is not just one thing that they are layer upon layers.”
Eastman, a self-taught contemporary photographer, has spent five decades documenting interiors and facades in different cities, producing large-scale photographs. He is most recognized for his mysterious narrative about time and space through the use of his exploration of architectural forms and textures of decay.
“He visits these spaces where there’s very much an applied sense of monumentality and also a sense of human energy and story in the architecture that he is presenting,” Villa says. “In the works that we got here, there’s sort of also this other element of implied figures within the details and the artwork that you will see in the photograph. So in one there’s a stairwell with the sculpture of the figure and things like that too, but there’s very much this sense of people not being there.”
Elevate at 21c will be on display through June 30. The 21c Museum Hotel is open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For more information, visit 21c Museum Hotel’s website.
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