Steve Wilson, Co-Founder of 21c Museum Hotels

Tell us about 21c Museum Hotels and why you founded it. 

My wife and I collect contemporary art. We buy from living artists. I like to say when an artist dies, they’re out of here. It’s all about living artists. Our collection grew too big for our home, so we wanted to share it with the public. We created the 21c Museum Hotels, which is a museum and a hotel together, and the exhibitions are curated and changed. So it’s very much like a museum in America. 

Do you have any favorite contemporary artists that you want to highlight at the moment? 

I love Robin Kid, who’s a young guy working in Paris. I also like Hank Willis Thomas, who’s working here in America. It’s hard to say a favorite because they’re all wonderful. I like Will Cotton who we just looked at. I like works that have a bit of mystery, a story to be told, something that asks a question where you’re not quite sure what you know.

Do you have any feelings about how people collect nowadays? Anything that you wish would change? 

To be honest, I don’t like publications printing the Top 100 based on how much they cost. Different ones have done that, but we just buy art that we love. Not based on how much we think it’s going to be worth in the future. Sometimes an artist becomes famous after that moment, and sometimes they don’t. But that’s not the point with us. My wife and I don’t use consultants. We like what we like. 

What constitutes your gravitation towards a certain piece of art?

We like to say it’s got to hit us in the heart or the gut. It’s. You know, artists can often address subject matter that we are not comfortable talking about, especially in the conservative southern part of America, where it’s not very common to talk about homosexuality or race relations or poverty or war. These are the kinds of things that artists can make us look at and think about. I think of contemporary artists as historians, or artists throughout history as always documenting the moment. They were all contemporary in their time, and you can look at art history and pretty much tell the history of the world. 

You go by @steveredglasses on social media, and I see you’re wearing those very glasses right now. Is there a story behind that?

I was walking on the streets of Paris, and I bought a pair of red glasses, and people began to comment on how great they looked. So I just started wearing them more and they became sort of my iconic look. So now I’m @steveredglasses on Instagram. 

(IG: steveredglasses)