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.
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.
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.
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.
Yet this exhibit from 2015 of Mose T works was absolute ragebait.
Y’all, the paintings were in frames. Framesssssss.
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.
BTW, I did a little search, and there are people still really into Holidomes (same.). See what you think.