Birds, Boats And Blue

With a new year comes changes, and perhaps none are so apparent as at 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Bentonville.

The hotel will welcome three new exhibits to its galleries by the end of January, reinventing the space within the realm of contemporary constructions and evoking a sense of transformation through storytelling.

The multi-artist installation, "Blue: Matter, Mood, and Melancholy," ascribes to the transitory motif of the color blue, a hue which museum director Alice Gray Stites says can represent joy, sadness, illness and vitality and has long been associated with longing and transformation.

"Blue is not a pigment, but it has been found to be in the cellular structure of plants, animals and minerals -- it's embedded," she says. "There is also this idea that the color blue is associated with the ephemeral. And on the color spectrum, it has the largest wavelength, which is why from far away, mountains look blue. It's a land you want to reach but cannot."

The walls of the video gallery will be draped in azure cloth and visitors will be invited to lounge on the blue silk ottoman as they view three young, flaxen-haired graces featured in Ragnar Kjartansson's six-hour video, "Song," Stites says. "The piece is inspired by a remembered line of an Allen Ginsberg poem -- 'the weight of the world is love' -- which is sung from dusk until dawn in a refrain."

The museum will also welcome the work of Duke Riley, New York tattooist and artist, who will personally present his two-part collection, "See You at the Finish Line," on Jan. 30 at the museum hotel.

"Rematch," an artistic retelling of the race which determined the Chinese zodiac, combines the notions of time, myth, culture, politics and art through video documentation and handmade props.

"A video will be shown of the race and the winners," Stites says. The race took place in China, and local children created drawings of the 12 animals which were used as flags on the 12 boats which participated in the race, she says. Meanwhile, opera singers sang of the victorious qualities of their animal and locals challenged each other (betting is illegal in China) to see who would guess the victor, she says.

"Of course, there were some wagers put on the race," she admits. "And to everyone's surprise, the horse won." The clever rat won the original race, according to legend.

The second part of Riley's collection is "Trading With the Enemy," a four-year project which defied the American embargo on Cuba. The installation will present video, artifacts, sculpture, drawings and paintings.

And live birds.

"As it is being presented, it does include pigeons," says Stites. The pigeons are some of the same birds used in Riley's project and will be housed in the museum in accordance with regulations by the National Pigeon Association and with help from local pigeon fanciers, she says.

Riley trained homing pigeons to fly from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Fla., while wearing cameras and smuggling elicit goods such as Cuban Cohiba cigars into Florida. From the footage, Riley created a video presentation of the flock's journey and the perils, heartbreak and triumph as they crossed the Florida strait.

"'Trading With the Enemy' is a very timely subject because it has to do with the tense relationship between America and Cuba," Stites says. The installation will focus on the facts and fictions that affect both nations since the signing of the Trading With the Enemy act in 1962, she says.

"He had a lot of co-conspirators -- both animal and human -- working together to help him pull off these ambitious projects," she says of Riley. "It's truly enjoyable."