Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel—featured on our annual “It List” shortly after opening—recently unveiled new works by up-and-coming artists. The factory-turned-hotel has plenty of art and design cachet, having opened in 2012 with major commissions by local artists Tom Fruin, Steve ESPO Powers, and Duke Riley, plus custom Brooklyn toile wallpaper by innovative print lab Flavor Paper. Still, it wasn’t until Kimia Ferdowsi Kline (a talented painter in her own right) took on the role of art curator a year and a half ago that Wythe Hotel’s collection really began to blossom. We stopped by this week to chat with her and see some of the artwork.
Sixteen of the hotel’s 70 rooms now feature original paintings, photography, drawings, and woodblock prints, a stop-motion animation installation, and even framed poetry written in-residence. Art in hotels is nothing new, of course. For the past several years, we’ve taken note of luxury hotels hanging world-class art in their lobbies. While any boutique hotel could hang up some Damian Hirst paintings and call it a day, what we find exciting about the Wythe Hotel’s collection is that it supports emerging and mid-career artists, most of whom are local. The owners aim to put art in every room and, what’s more, every three to four months they host a public opening, turning the hip hotel into a pseudo gallery.