Have dinner with a local artist while starting or adding to your art collection! Join Gray & Dudley and 21c Nashville for their upcoming Art Collectors’ Dinner featuring Nashville-based photographer Caroline Allison, whose work has been exhibited across the country and internationally. Guests will be treated to a tour of Caroline’s Elevate exhibition, intimate conversations with the artist, a special dinner by Gray & Dudley chef Matt Bell, and will take home a cyanotype by Caroline inspired by the evening’s menu. Tickets.

Elevate at 21c presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding each 21c Museum Hotel property. Elevate provides hotel guests with unique access to the work of notable regional artists while featuring their work in the context of 21c’s contemporary art space. To view these works, please stop by the front desk to arrange access to the vitrines on guest room floors.

Centered on our relationship to the present-day environment, Allison’s new body of work is comprised of large-scale color landscape photographs and cyanotype photograms. Her work includes in-camera manipulations of the ocean, the rising moon, rivers, and other archetypal landscapes. In contrast to previous bodies of work that document a specific place or moment, this series offers an interpretative perspective, highlighting the artist’s contemplation of time. Moments of ephemerality in the natural world are seen through cyanotype photograms of spider webs and exploding snowballs. Time’s steadfast and quiet presence is evident in photographs of the passing moon and changing tides. Through multiple exposures, sometimes as many as 50 on one sheet of film, the photographs are attempts to seize time and to understand the thin slice of air and earth that sustains us, which we so precariously inhabit.

Allison’s commercial and editorial work has been featured in Garden & Gun, Travel & Leisure, The Wall Street Journal, Southern Living, Lonny Magazine, This Old House, Men’s Journal, Oxford American, The Local Palate, Gilt, The Scout Guide: Nashville, TRADhome and The Callaway Report. Her photographs can be found in the collections of Billy and Jennifer Frist, The 4040 Hotel, Music City Convention Center and Noelle Hotel. Her work has been on display in exhibitions in New York at Bergdorf Goodman, Riva Gallery, APEX art, Art + Culture and Daniel Cooney Fine Art, in Chicago at Slow Gallery and NFA Space, in Atlanta at Whitespace Gallery and in Nashville at Zeitgeist Gallery, David Lusk, The 404 Hotel and Virgin Hotels Nashville.