I spent seven hours inside the Nashville, Tennessee airport last week before they announced my flight had been cancelled. I was in town to see the latest 21c Hotel and Museum, but assumed I would only be staying there one night. At 11 pm, I returned to the hotel for a second evening in the hopes of getting a wistful 5 hours of sleep before returning to the airport the next morning. It wasn’t the best day.
The lodging I returned to, though, made my crappy travel bearable. 21c Museum Hotel has all the perks of a W Hotel (minus the nightclub vibe) and adds access to a 24 hour contemporary art museum to the mix. The shows change with the regularity of most museums and promise to challenge visitors rather than placate them. There’s art in all the elevators (a Leslie Thornton binocular video fit perfectly in the space), all the lobbies, the conferences rooms, the bar and restaurant, in some of the rooms and will soon always be on the TVs. (21c will be launching their own video art program that will be the default station.) The only place they omit art is the gym.
If there’s a nice place to land for extra night, it’s a museum.
