Deep Fried Kudzu

I’m putting Holiday Inn Holidomes — that terrific mix of motel atrium/pool/fernglade — and a community college museum with a bit of a wonky collection of porcelain together today.

The Evelyn Burrow Museum at Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, Alabama, mostly made up of the namesake’s porcelain collection, isn’t a particularly rare grouping of items that’s going to make anyone who knows the finer points of Meissen and Sevres skip a heartbeat, but it is reflective of a real person’s real passions, which is plenty, and in certain ways, adorable.

What ties everything together today is Evelyn Burrow, hometown hotelier, who was known for

“opening one of the most successful Holiday Inns in America,

which held a Top 10 spot for years

and attracted such guests as Ethel Kennedy.”

The takeaway being Ethel Kennedy sought out and stayed at a Holiday Inn in Cullman. So many of us are now one degree of Kevin Bacon closer.

So yeah. Now, was the Cullman Holiday Inn an official Holidome? The old postcard of it I found on eBay doesn’t say specifically. But the wording on the verso, ‘dining room overlooking indoor pool with underwater music,’ is Holidome if not in name then in spirit.

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This is undoubtedly the low-rent version of Proust and madeleines, but I can look at that picture of the motel pool and smell the chlorine and feel that heavy wet air hanging in the atrium’s atmosphere. It had such a density that almost added to gravity.

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Anyway, Burrow’s collection of porcelain, crystal, and figurines eventually found a home at Wallace State, forming the nucleus of this small museum.

When I stopped by in April during the ag department’s spring plant sale, the featured exhibit wasn’t porcelain at all but the work of the late Brother Jude Johnston, a monk at St Bernard in Cullman.

I’ll only put a few pics here, and found a few of his pieces troublesome — with works like one called “Christ of the Holocaust” and another, a sculpture concept elegizing children who died in the Holocaust. It was…upsetting. As a Jewish person I may see this in a different light than the general public though.

You know I love to love things but this was not it. There’s a terrible part of me that thinks this is evocative of an old Packard Bell with a glitchy version of Windows 3D Pipes screensaver.

and there was this kind of thing.

and this.

The simpleton in me said “Magnatiles, but make it paper”:

But yeah, I get it – math.

You know, maybe it’s his Holocaust pieces that put me in a bad mood and sour about his other pieces. I really, really did not like those. It was hard to shake off.

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Actually the last time I was here, the “Cultivating the Dutch Tradition in the 21st Century, Jane Jones” exhibit was up, which was much more agreeable.

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Yet this exhibit from 2015 of Mose T works was absolute ragebait.

Y’all, the paintings were in frames. Framesssssss.

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Actually, you know, this museum is great.

I bet they have a terrific relationship with the community and it’s super approachable for someone to come by and say “maybe we could do an exhibit with this.” That kind of accessiblity is everything. This world needs more of that.

Really, we need more democratization of wonder (I’m going to have to do a deep-dive on if Martha Nussbaum would go along with this the way I’m thinking of it right now), but certainly a collection/something/anything shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be rarified to be appreciated.

I like thinking about what Evelyn Burrow must have been like…how when she wasn’t running a Holiday Inn **with, hello, a pool that had underwater music** she was thinking about her pretty collector plates.

Maybe she giggled to friends that she was a Capodimonte girl. That is sweet. That’s the magic, really: not the objects themselves, but the person behind them. And it was kind of her to have them so others can enjoy.

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BTW, I did a little search, and there are people still really into Holidomes (same.). See what you think.

Plane Store
Vinemont AL, 2023.

At the Met last summer, I got to see the Sargent & Paris exhibit, which included his 1884 painting of Mrs. Albert Vickers (Edith Foster). It’s 82-3/4″ × 39-13/16″ — so, huge. About the same size as Madame X.

And she’s holding a magnolia.

Edith Foster Vickers is the subject, and she’s here at that point in Sargent’s career in which he’s looking for a bounce after the Madame X scandal — although he already had the commission in-hand.

He lost clients in the Paris fallout, and having this to look forward to must have been incredibly important to his ego. And it feels like “lessons were learned”: she’s dressed modestly, holiding a classic flower, she’s elegant.

The charcoal  study of it is in the Harvard’s collection. He’d given it to his sisters, Violet (Mrs. Francis) Ormond and Emily Sargent, at his death in 1925 and they gifted it to the Fogg Art Museum in 1931.

Sargent did this and other Vickers family portraits while staying at their estate in England, basically putting some distance between what had just gone on in the press.

Besides painting Edith, he painted her husband Albert (who led a steel and defense empire — later down the line the tanks and vehicles business, aviation, and shipbuilding arms of the business were purchased by BAE, then other bits by Rolls-Royce), and the painting he did of the three nieces won a grand medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition.

This painting of Edith Vickers is especially sweet because they became such good friends — the Met label mentions that Vickers’ daughter (Izme, herself an artist, who he came back to paint in 1907) said “Sargent was devoted to my mother.”

The painting of Edith today is back home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Weekly notes on Southern art, architecture, food, and travel

As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.

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Robert Johnson’s Come on in my Kitchen in newly-restored audio

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Here, the monument for Rezin P. Bowie, brother of Jim Bowie and inventory of the Bowie knife, from a 2007 visit I made to the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Port Gibson, MS

Born from a Duel: A history of the Bowie & other knives in Louisiana, from 64 Parishes:

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Tujague’s, from a 2016 visit — the sign has since been restored and is now on display at SoFab.

Meet the Neon King of New Orleans at Garden & Gun — Nate Schaeffer’s shop here.

“By the 1950s, New Orleans had more neon than Las Vegas. Canal Street had six hundred signs within a few blocks.”

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I missed this from late last year, but Dezeen reports on this development for a school in Uniontown, Alabama:

Architect Danish Kurani has developed a prototype for a “connected” classroom, designed to enable expert teachers to remotely provide lessons to students in rural communities.

Kurani completed the first iteration of the Connected Classroom at Robert C Hatch High School in Alabama’s rural Black Belt region, in partnership with nonprofit Ed Farm and the State of Alabama.

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Domilise’s, from a 2012 visit

Todd Kliman’s Submitting to the Beast: A father and son in New Orleans—feasting and flaneuring at the Oxford American

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Lake Pontchartrain, 2023

The Library of America’s Story of the Week is “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” by Margaret Fuller:

I think the LoA’s link to the actual story may be routing to an incorrect page — this one seems to be right. And here it is as PDF.

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BIG’s design for Nashville’s upcoming Tennessee Performing Arts Centre can be viewed here.

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In the latest New Yorker, I noticed an ad for The Folio Society with an image of books including To Kill a Mockingbird. Theirs is illustrated by Nate Sweitzer.

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At Christie’s, A tale of two Matildas: how the Gray Stream family assembled one of America’s finest collections of Fabergé, jewels and more
Unseen for more than a century, Imperial Fabergé masterpieces, custom Cartier designs and Diego Rivera paintings are amongst the treasures lovingly collected by Louisiana businesswoman Matilda Geddings Gray and her niece Matilda Gray Stream. Links to the June auctions are at the bottom of the page.

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xoxo!

Southern Accents
Cullman AL, 2023.

I’ve been reading How Flowers Made Our World (here on Bookshop, here on Amazon) by David George Haskill, a book that really has me thinking about magnolias.

Here’s what’s super fascinating: magnolias are so old that when they evolved, bees weren’t…

…Well, how to say this the right way? There weren’t bees yet.

Which, I realize this isn’t how the world works — not everything showed up at the same time — but imaginging a time before bees (and butterflies, and hummingbirds) is not the easiest thing.

So 95 million years ago or so, dinosaurs were strolling around magnolias.

What do magnolias do to be pollinated? Enter: beetles and flies. Those were the primary insect pollinators back then, so this helps explain things like how magnolias evolved to make things easy for them. The blooms are large and bowl-shaped (and thick so as not to be trampled by beetle legs crawling), and the blossoms smell great because beetles rely more on scent than sight.

While some trees started with wind pollination, the magnolia and its beautiful flowers stays with the beetle. And so incredibly interesting, the magnolia traps beetles (in a really nice way that they actually enjoy, because it’s so comfortable) overnight to ensure the beetle has the opportunity to do its job in the time it takes for the flower to go from its female to male stage. Depending on variety, magnolias do this different ways.

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BTW, other chapters in the book discuss goatsbeard, orchids, grass, seagrass, rose, tea, and pansy.