The Elevate Program at 21c presents curated temporary exhibitions for artists living and working in the communities surrounding each 21c Museum Hotel property. Elevate provides hotel guests with unique access to the work of notable regional artists, while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s world-class contemporary art collection.

On exhibition from March – September 2018, Elevate at 21c Bentonville presents three women artists whose works synthesize references to both landscape, and the human body. Please join us Friday, June 15 from 6:30-8:30pm for a welcome reception and panel conversation with the artists. Event will take place in Gallery 3 and include a tour of the work on guest room floors.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

2^ndFloor: Dawn Holder, Clarksville, AR
Dawn Holder is a sculptor and installation artist who investigates various elements of landscape and their socio-cultural significance through porcelain and mixed media. As Associate Professor of Art at the University of the Ozarks, she currently teaches ceramics, sculpture, and art history. Holder was awarded an Arkansas Arts Council 2015 Individual Artist Fellowship Grant for Sculpture and Installation Art and the Bagwell Outstanding Faculty Award in 2016.

She has shown her work in galleries and museums throughout the country, including the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, DC); Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR); the Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA); the Zanesville Museum of Art (Zanesville, OH); and the Historic Arkansas Museum (Little Rock, AR). Holder also serves as the Coordinator of Projects Space, a performative and installation-based exhibition of experimental ceramics at the annual National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts (NCECA) conference. She received an MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Georgia.

3^rdFloor: LaDawna Whiteside, Fayetteville, AR
Born in 1970 in rural Oklahoma, LaDawna Whiteside’s American lineage dates beyond the Dust Bowl. She is the descendent of a farmer, an orphaned coal miner’s daughter, a charismatic preacher and a female factory worker. Whiteside sifts through 19^thcentury American social history and uses materials, process and place to form a visual dialogue. She contemplates strands of truth woven within contradictions as she attempts to cultivate meaning through repetitive mark making and a sacred connection to the land.

Her projects are based in abstraction bearing a kinship to the work and philosophies of Cy Twombly, Anni Albers, Agnes Martin and Ann Hamilton.  Whiteside explains, “Vital to human development is a formula for literacy that involves sensuality, physicality, emotions and critical thinking.” She demonstrates a layering of literacy by combining reading and writing with her proposed formula.

Pursuing an alternative sublime, Whiteside chronicles this place and time, focusing on landscape topography and animal architecture. Whiteside also references contemporary cultural intersections, commonalities and social divides. Through constant questioning, she challenges a broader perception of human response toward the landscape and how we act toward each other.

For more than forty years Whiteside has lived in Arkansas where she currently raises cattle and tends to a small flock of laying hens. With a watchful eye, she is engaged and aware within the struggle, contemplating how to build cultural bridges through social and landscape integration.

4^thFloor: Rena Detrixhe, Tulsa, OK
Rena Detrixhe creates contemplative work combining repetitive process and collected or scavenged materials to produce meticulous, large-scale objects and installations. Drawn to materials which possess an inherent story or familiar source and often utilizing natural elements, a continuing objective in her practice is to investigate the relationship between humans and the natural world. Recent work explores systems of value in relation to land and water and slowness as a means of cultivating empathy and understanding.

Detrixhe received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2013. She has exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and is the recipient of numerous awards including a scholarship to attend the prestigious art school at Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea and a two-year studio residency with Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. Recent exhibitions include Ephemeraat the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, and a solo exhibition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2017 she received both the public vote and juried vote awards in the time-based category for her work Red Dirt Rugat ArtPrize Nine in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Detrixhe has spent the past two years as a Tulsa Artist Fellow in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Image: Dawn Holder (American), Grass Variation (Hill) (detail), 2018. Porcelain.