The SuperNatural 2.0

Exhibition Opening

February 13th, 6-8pm at 21c Museum Hotel Bentonville

21c Bentonville is unveiling a new exhibition with The SuperNatural 2.0. The exhibition, which remains on view through December 2026 throughout the 21c Bentonville gallery spaces, presents a thematic group exhibition of 90 multi-media artworks by 43 artists from across the globe exploring how the natural world is now experienced and understood as both organic and artificial. The SuperNatural 2.0 features works by Albano Afonso, Edward Burtynsky, Nancy Baker Cahill, Elena Dorfman, Chris Doyle, Lars Jan, Richard Mosse, Patricia Piccinini, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more.
The SuperNatural 2.0, 21c Bentonville’s latest exhibition, opens to the public on February 13, 2026 , with a reception from 6 to 8pm. An introduction to the exhibition by 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites at 6:45pm will be followed by a presentation from featured visiting artist, Nancy Baker Cahill. Refreshments crafted by The Hive restaurant will be available for guests to enjoy. The museum is free and open 24/7, 365 days a year.

Opening Night Timeline

6:00pm doors open

6:45pm introductory remarks from 21c Chief Curator, Alice Gray Stites

7:00pm Special presentation by featured artist, Nancy Baker Cahill

Refreshments provided by the Hive

As images of the post-industrial world transform into the bytes and pixels of the digital age, the sublime is becoming the supernatural. Landscape, once the realm of the bucolic and pastoral, now appears alluring and alarming, fantastical, threatening, and threatened, reflecting the earth’s evolution toward an Anthropocene: a planet whose contours and contents will be defined by human activity. During periods of significant concurrent economic, technological, and socio-political change such as the current time, the concept of hybrids proliferates, embodying fear and desire, the known and the unknown. They and the territories they may inhabit belong to the uncanny, a place eerily alien and familiar at once. In these still and moving images of land and cityscapes, and in the fabricated figures of The SuperNatural, nature meets technoculture, and the new natural is both organic and artificial.
“Invoking past and future in a critique of the present, these paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations document observed, current realities while referencing the aesthetic traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries,” says 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. “Influenced by Romanticism and Surrealism, science and commerce, these visions narrate how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era generated the promise and peril of the digital age and explore the potential for adaptation to the visceral and virtual realities of the future.”

Today technology is increasingly integrated into the environment; computer-generated materials and algorithms are reshaping and redefining how “the natural” world is seen, experienced, and understood, as delineated in works by Albano Afonso, Chris Doyle, Jennifer Steinkamp, Quayola, Nancy Baker Cahill, and others. Quayola’s videos, Jardins d’Été and Pleasant Places, are inspired by the European landscapes once inhabited and painted by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet. Using high resolution 3D scanners to capture the countryside of France, Quayola uses custom software and algorithms to reduce the resulting 3D renderings to 2D colors that move and sway, blur and blend, marking an investigation into the ways that nature was observed, studied, and arranged by artists in the 19th century and the ways in which technology today “sees” landscape.