A warm Fall evening is the perfect time for a walking exploration of Main Street Durham.  The old street is substantially arrayed in 21st Century commerce and entertainment.  Upscale Salons, Bars, Silicon Valley type incubators for fledgling business startups, and of course the restaurants, make up the mix of tenants for the old 20th

century buildings.  A new “skyscraper” is under construction which will dwarf the existing multi story buildings surrounding it.

We visited the gallery at the 21 c Hotel.  21 c has taken the historic Hill Building, once one of the main banks in Durham transforming it into a hotel with art gallery.  The gallery has 10,500 feet of exhibition space for contemporary art.  The

theme of the work on display last night was “The SuperNatural.”  The exhibit features images of the natural world transformed by technology, a post industrial world of hybrid creatures, the product of genetic manipulation.  In other words, Nature meets technoculture.  The work by various artists depict the promise and the peril of the digital age.  I was certainly stimulated and challenged by much of the work that we

saw.  Certainly the point of art is to provoke rather than to entertain.

If you’d like to see more and learn more about the work that we viewed click HERE.

We completed our visit to 21 c by enjoying a glass of wine and an appetizer in the Counting House restaurant in the hotel.  The decor around us was a feast for the eye.  The deviled eggs that we ordered were delicious.  The best part of the evening for me was the company.

Clearly Durham is in renaissance mode.