The Newbury Boston’s Hotel Art Collection Is Fit For A City Museum

09.08.2023 - 13:07 / forbes.com / Art

In recent years, hotels around the world have promoted a flowering of fine art in their typically enormous spaces. Owners might put their private collections on display, while in many cases, acquisitions are curated to reflect and pay homage to the host city’s history and local color. For its part, The Leading Hotels of the World group of some 400 properties prides itself on cultural elements being one of the primary motivations for membership.

Put those two elements together and you’ll encounter a most striking art collection in Boston’s Back Bay at the newly restored and rebranded Newbury Boston, originally the city’s preeminent 1927 Ritz-Carlton. Working artists and curators, Mike Carroll and Lynne Kortenhaus shaped the Newbury collection in part to pay homage to Boston’s rich past in emulating 19th-century European salon culture, a time when Isabella Stewart Gardner was known as the most prominent art patron.

The contemporary artists they selected for the Newbury work in all manner of media, and all either come from the Boston region or are active in the area’s arts education community. Many also have works in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the city’s Institute of Contemporary Art (the Newbury offers package bookings with these institutions).

And seldom will you find a hotel website that so thoroughly encapsulates its property’s art project, both visually and descriptively. As they move through the hotel’s public areas, guests and visitors can listen to an audio commentary by curator Carroll as well.

The Newbury looks over the majestic Boston Public Garden. One of the driving ideas behind the collection is to bring the park in spirit into the hotel, in the use of bright and often verdant colors, materials and subject matter. And that ethos starts where it should, at the entrance, or entrances really, depending on whether you come in from the Arlington Street or the Newbury Street sides (with the latter being the new official front entry).

The first object with a natural world connection that draws the eye is a functional one, a selection from Jeffrey Beers International who designed the public areas. Romanian sculptor Andreea Braescu is known for her lighting works in the form of delicate ceramic ginkgo leaves. Centering the Newbury lobby, her lovely leaf chandelier takes you back to the Public Garden whose eight specimens from the world’s oldest living tree species are celebrated.

Beyond the chandelier, the front desk jumps out at you from a distance as well with an unmistakable art history reference on the wall behind it. Should there be any doubt, the title of the Elis Ansel painting behind the desk will clear it up fast: Déjeuner (2020). Commissioned for the Newbury, the piece also