Who We Are
Steve Wilson & Laura Lee Brown :: Founders
Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown are Louisville-based philanthropists, contemporary art collectors, and the co-founders of artwithoutwalls. In 2006, they opened 21c Museum Hotel, an historic rehabilitation and urban revitalization project in downtown Louisville. 21c features a 90-room hotel and a restaurant, Proof on Main. It also houses 21c Museum, the first in museum North America dedicated solely to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art of the 21st century. 21c Museum presents group and solo exhibitions of emerging and recognized artists, as well as permanent commissioned installations. The 9,000-square-foot facility is open free of charge twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown are the recipients of the John Russell Groves Citizens Laureate Award, which is presented by the AIA Kentucky to honor those who “through leadership, service and dedication to a better living environment, have supported and encouraged the values of quality architecture.” They also received the Kentucky Society of Architects 2005 award for outstanding service to the profession of architecture in Kentucky. They are staunch protectors of Kentucky's rural landscape and have provided many years of leadership and financial support for programs and projects promoting the cultural and intellectual life of Louisville.
Alice Gray Stites :: Director
Alice Gray Stites is the director and curator of artwithoutwalls. Before joining artwithoutwalls, Alice was an independent consultant, lecturer, and curator, and from 1995 to 2006 served as adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. Representative exhibitions organized at the Speed include The Theatre of Self-Invention: Self-Portraiture in Contemporary Art; The Body in Question: Tracing, Displacing, and Remaking the Figure in Contemporary Art; and Contemplating the Contemporary Still Life: Mary Ann Currier, A Retrospective. She has also organized exhibitions at the University of Kentucky Art Museum and at 21C MuseumHotel. For 21C Museum, she curated Hybridity: The Evolution of Species and Spaces in 21st-Centuy Art; Looking Now; and Through the Rabbit Hole: Sleights of Scale and Flights of Fantasy. In addition to numerous exhibition catalog essays, she is the author of Ansel Adams: The National Park Service Photographs (Abbeville, 1995) and Contemplating the Contemporary Still Life: Mary Ann Currier, A Retrospective, (Speed Art Museum, 2005). Alice Gray Stites graduated magna cum laude from the University of Virginia, and earned a Master of Arts from Columbia University.