In true LINE fashion, the [LINE Austin](https://www.thelinehotel.com/austin/) welcomes photographer, multimedia artist and activist Moyo Oyelola for a residency until December 12th. Born in Nigeria and living in Austin since the age of 7, Oyelola embodies both places, bringing his pan-African perspective to Austin’s vibrant art community. As a part of a partnership with Big Medium, the LINE offers this residency program for local artists to work in new environments and to highlight art as a major player of the hospitality experience.
Since opening in 2018, the LINE Austin has pursued art partnerships, maintaining it as a central tenant to the hotel’s ethos. Through partnering with Big Medium and the Downtown Austin Alliance, the hotel has given space and opportunities to Austin’s art community, including the upcoming collaboration between Sandra Chevrier and Shepard Fairey. The two will create a mural extending 12 stories high on the west side of the LINE, celebrating women in history.
_Flaunt_ had the opportunity to speak with Isadora McKeon, the Creative & Culture VP of Sydell Group (owners and creators of the LINE) to discuss the state of hospitality, why art is so central to the hotel’s ethos, and what’s coming down the pipeline.
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**I want to start asking about the state of hospitality and how everything has been going for you? Especially right now with another possible lockdown.**
Well, I mean, as you can imagine it’s been an exceptionally challenging year for all of us. I never in my wildest imagination could have pictured that our whole industry would be shut down. And so there is this juggling of all of these different emotional concerns, which is one, people’s health and safety, which is our first and foremost when you are in the hospitality business. So obviously when there is a risk to public health, that is a huge thing, and then there is the fact of seeing massive furloughs and layoffs in our industry, and just a huge concern about the future of the restaurant industry, and the tremendous weight of trying to bring people back to work in a way that is appropriate, and safe, and protects them, but that also keeps the economy flowing. It’s just a huge conundrum. As much as it is on a personal level, it is, for us, on a business level. So we take it day by day, and we just go above and beyond and apply the same creativity we applied to things in the past, we apply to this new world. It’s a heartbreaking time, but I’ll say, like anything, sometimes in the darkest hours the lights shine bright. Just watching people come together to figure it out feels like we are a support mechanism for each other, and we are scrappy, and we are accepting the way things are and just figuring it out as we go. We are lucky that in Texas it’s a more wide open space, materially, Austin compared to New York or LA. So while in Texas overall rates are higher, and we did go into an increased stage of lockdown, things are still pretty safe here, so we are lucky for that.
**Pivoting to something less doom and gloom, what brought you to bringing Moyo Oyelola work to the line?**
I have lived in Austin since 2006. So I am very connected to the community here, this is my home. When we were first building the LINE Austin, particularly, I reached out to a lot of my friends. I had worked for a hotel company that was smaller before, and so I never had the gift of space and size. And so in reaching out to my friends about what were some of the needs in the community right at that moment, this was a couple years ago, obviously Austin has become a very desirable destination to live in, and lots of tech companies are coming here. Of course cost of living has increased significantly over the past few years and one of the things that always goes by the wayside it’s artist’s space and so that was something that was said to me recurrently. Physical space for artists. So whether that was in the form of studio space, gallery space, etc. So that was on my mind, in our minds, a lot when we were thinking about this. Austin’s tagline is ‘the life music capital’, and people always think about music when they are here, but there is an incredibly vibrant visual arts community here. Particularly not on national museum level, really on ground level, amazing work being done here. So we had this space on the second floor, that was this perfect opportunity to dedicate it to art space, obviously we are in the hotel business, we didn’t build an art studio, but it just happened to be the thing that we thought we could offer, and we wanted to work with an organization locally that we thought really championed artists, and so we chose Big Medium. Big Medium is incredible, they do the East Austin studio tour, the West Austin studio tour, they do the Texas Biennale. They are kind of the epicenter of creating art culture in town, and they had the experience of doing artist residency programs. We partnered with them shortly after the hotel opened and have had a series of artists in residence for two years.
Moyo was chosen in this year’s group of applicants for the residency this year, for a lot of reasons, personally why I think Moyo is amazing is that Moyo is truly an artist. This is someone who lives an artful life in everything they do. If you look at his body of work it’s so diverse, it’s not one form, it’s just taking expression in everything that he does, so, of course, that’s really interesting. The quality of his work is stunning and amazing. And also, you know, just looking for a broad swath of voices, he has a very unique voice. He was born in Nigeria, so there’s a lot of experience of multiple worlds that is really interesting. Those are some, among several reasons why we thought his work was super compelling, and, of course, then, as covid hit, we really came back to the artist and said “what’s comfortable for you? Is this still valuable for you?” This is not some kind of marketing partnership, this is truly intended to be a benefit to people, to artists, so if it still feels like a benefit, then great. And it turns out it did. So instead of being in the art studio, because the way it’s been set up in the past is that people who stay in the hotel can actually go visit the artist studio when they have visit hours, but obviously we are not doing that now, so Moyo is doing short windows in the lobby, that is big, voluminous, lots of space. Then all of the artists have an opportunity to sell their work, and honestly that’s the thing that I am the most proud of. One part of the ground floor, that for one reason or another, at the last minute, we were sort of like ‘okay, what are we going to do with this space?’ and we decided to paint it white and turn it into the gallery, and the hotel guest rooms have 500 original commissioned works that were commissioned for this hotel from Texas’ artists.
**That’s great!**
It’s really awesome! One of my friends is one of the artists, and it totally changed her life, because she got commissioned to make 100 and something works and she got to go into this whole new direction, which really changed the nature of her work. It was really, really cool. Even though our guests are very cultured, maybe don’t really totally look at art in a hotel room with the same intent that you would in a gallery setting. So we painted this elevator corridor off the lobby white and started hanging those artists’ other work, so they could have a show there, and Monica was just telling me that someone from London saw it, went back home, and then commissioned a work from her. It is actually selling, and we don’t take a commission, of course. So it just makes me really thrilled. You know, I know a lot of companies do partnerships and support the arts, but it feels really good when you can do something that actually is real, and that people need, and benefits people.
**It’s great. I really appreciate that it’s striving to directly support those artists. That’s awesome.**
Yeah, I am really stoked on it. I am very excited to see his work there over the next couple of months. And guests totally, not even in a fake way, cause when you are in the hotel business, you are in the telling the story of a city business. So you try to create those moments. As a traveller, when I go to a place the last thing I want to do is sit in a lobby with a lot of other tourists per se. I want to be in the place. So those moments where you can actually bring something of the city to the visitors, they are really into it. It’s cool.
**Kind of a good segue, I wanted to ask about what in particular about the Austin art community makes this so exciting, and makes you enthusiastic about these collaborations?**
Well, like I said, I am an Austinite, so that is my community, and it’s always been a place where, partly because of the fact that it used to be cheap to live here, it’s really cheap to visit here, it was a place where you could just come and you could do things, and it had a slower pace, and all this sounds so hokey but you can have a bigger backyard, you can rent, there’s just more opportunity for artists It just created this more enduring and vibrant group of people who somehow have continued to embody that spirit. Then it’s benefitted by people, it’s becoming more international, and there are really interesting people coming here. I think, like I was saying before, I love the contemporary here, it’s an amazing museum, but when I first moved I didn’t really understand why there weren’t more museums, but I realized it’s because it’s more of the people. There are just living, working artists everywhere here. It’s not about gallery culture, or the corporate art world. So that’s a big thing, and then I would say my biggest thing about Austin is it’s queer culture. I am not going to lie, I think we suffer from some lack of diversity, there is a lot of segregation, and there’s a lot of racial issues in our city, like in many cities, but, from a queer perspective, this city is vibrantly queer and it has a great, incredible culture in that regard. I would say our art scene is steadfastly queer, and diverse in that regard.
**That’s awesome. I can tell you are very passionate about Austin, which I love.**
Yeah, well I mean we do this in all of our cities. And I am passionate about it everywhere. But I have a personal, intimate relationship with Austin. Like I said, when you are in the hotel business you are in the business of cities, and you are only as good as your cities are vibrant and interesting, and a place where somebody wants to come. I didn’t go to school to be a hotel person, I just found that it was a way where there could be this mutual dialogue, and this benefit to communities because both populations benefit from this intersection.
**I want to ask about anything else that’s coming down the pipeline that you are excited about.**
Well, first I just want to say I am extremely proud that we have multiple women of color owning and operating restaurants within our building, I was the one who pushed very hard to have Veracruz Tacos to come. I didn’t have to push very hard, they are amazing, they are the best, but I am just proud of that generally. But where I was going is that, you know, it’s a really hard time for restaurants, and working with Kristen Kish, who I am so proud to have in our community, speaking of diversity and inclusivity, she is just amazing. Thinking creatively about how we can continue, because restaurants, to me, are like tiny little works of art. In a commercial world someone can create this artistic vision, that’s accessible to the mainstream audience, and it’s just heartbreaking to think of this huge industry of creative outlets waning. We are losing so much creativity by losing restaurants, and this is a hard thing. But again we don’t want anybody to be unsafe, so how can we keep pushing to something innovatively to bring back creativity in ways that you feel safe. We are setting up these yurts, outside, all winter long. It’s you and your pod, 6-8 people, and it’s a private dining experience. It’s all designed family style so that it’s safer for the servers and the guests when they drop the food, and we are transforming the pool deck. We, as human beings, also feel like gathering is so hard and yet so missed, so we prefaced if there was a way to do it safely, so that was sort of this project that we are really proud to be part of. It’s also happening in 12 other cities. But it’s an incredible group of restaurants and it was based on ‘yeah, how can we continue to foster creativity?’ Hospitality is about making whimsy and magic. Hotels and restaurants are the places where landmark events happen often. The place you stay on your wedding night. The place where a wedding happens. So it’s just really important to us to be able to foster that beauty in our own lives and other people’s however we can.
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Moyo Oyelola’s residency goes through December 12th and he works publicly in the hotel lobby on Mondays and Fridays from 3pm – 5pm.
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