New Exhibitions at 21c Museum Hotel

Join us in welcoming two new exhibitions to 21c Bentonville – Truth or Dare: A Realty Show & Wim Botha: Still Life with Discontent on Saturday, January 22nd at 3pm. 21c’s Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites will be in conversation with artist Wim Botha from his home in Cape Town, South Africa. Champagne and hors d’oeuvres will be served at 4pm.

We are taking every precaution necessary to fight the spread of Covid-19. Masks are required when not eating or drinking and social distancing practices will be in place.

Wim Botha: Still Life with Discontent is Botha’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., featuring works that span his career. Botha’s art is a study in contrasts: his pieces are simultaneously sacred yet profane, heavy yet light, and stable yet unsettled. Through his varying materials and subject matter, this South African artist explores weighty issues of history, status, power, and religion, referencing a range of art historical influences while resisting fixed interpretation.

Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare: A Reality Show emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief through works that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artists included in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials.