Spend enough time in a humanities or arts department at a U.S. college and you’ll likely hear some variation of, “Can you believe they built a new sports stadium, but the communications building still has the same elevator that closes on students and smells like mildew?” A college is meant to educate, but it also needs to raise capital to do so—and some ventures are more attractive than others for alumni donors seeking to attach their name to a building. How do we fund the arts and the larger educational project when donations, tuition, and grants just don’t seem to be enough? And, more pressing: How can this be done in a way that does not reduce the college to a commercial enterprise—to a perceived cash-for-degree, transactional plot?
On the periphery of Orlando, immediately adjacent to downtown Winter Park, is the Alfond Inn—a hotel operating at a peculiar juncture of luxury and education that partly eschews this commercial-educational antagonism. Alfond Inn is owned by Rollins College, a relatively small liberal arts college bordering a section of Winter Park’s multi-mile Great Chain of Lakes, less than a hundred feet across from the Inn. The 183-room boutique hotel is Rollins College’s answer to the demands of funding and education, balancing the seemingly incompatible institutional drives of education, business, and art. It is an idiosyncratic response: not only is the Alfond Inn operationally tethered to Rollins (unlike many hotels that are near colleges yet independently operated), but its gross income is directed to students—funding 10 full-ride undergraduate scholarships each year.
Started in 2013, the hotel draws from a communal art repository shared with the Rollins Museum of Art (RMA), meaning the same piece could be displayed at the hotel and later in an exhibition at the museum, appearing in and occupying entirely different contexts: the white-walled lauded space of a gallery and the lazily affluent atmosphere of a 4-start hotel. The art hotel is named after notable donors and alumni of Rollins College, Barbara and Ted Alfond, who both attended the college in the late 60s and who, through their patronage, created the Alfond collection of Contemporary Art. This is the distinctive feature of the Alfond Inn: the art is not separate from RMA’s permanent archive; in the case of the Alfond collection, it is the exact same, rendering the art hotel a proxy for the museum itself.
That collection, curated by Abagail Ross Goodman and subsidized by the Alfonds, is intended to function as a “visual syllabus.” Goodman writes in the RMA art book Art for Rollins that the visual syllabus is “a pathway for study, investigation and knowledge, the result of which is crucial to the development of a new generation of global citizens.” It is an assemblage of pieces meant to edify and orient the viewer; artwork that comes together in an underlying, implicit way (not in terms of thematic continuity) for the pedagogical purpose of teaching the recipient something about art and life itself—certainly a lofty ambition for a hotel.
Due to the meticulous selection of art to cultivate a “visual syllabus,” the pieces featured in the hotel primarily consist of conceptual art that defies easy aesthetic entry or clear-cut comprehension. This is exactly the “Serious Art” that one would expect to see in a museum. Many of the pieces are text-based, a recurring motif that corresponds to RMA’s pedagogic mission. As Barbara Alfond writes, “The mastery of new vocabularies enlarges our world.” Or, as Joseph Kosuth’s No Number 3, located directly above the receptionist desk, announces in warm-white neon: “Language must speak for itself.”
No Number 3 is indicative of the conceptual art found throughout the hotel: cerebral, thought-provoking, and slightly enigmatic. Rather than supplying a purely aesthetic experience for the casual viewer, this piece—like much of the Alfond collection—challenges the recipient by questioning the very foundations of language, art, and their inter-relationality. If language must speak for itself, where does this leave textual interpretation? Is the visual deprived of a certain self-determination that the linguistic is automatically conferred? Can anything even be said about a piece that declares its own self-sufficiency? All this swirls around while one collects their room key and asks when the pool closes (it’s at 8pm).
Following the text-centric theme, located in front of the spa is Steve Locke’s piece, Untitled. Like Kosuth’s No Number 3, Locke’s work announces its message in neon letters: “I Remember Everything You Taught Me Here.” In a larger medium—flags hung up to the fifth-floor ceiling, each flag about half a floor lower than the last—the same message is stated on four separate flags: “I remember”/“Everything”/“You Taught me”/Here.” What else is being taught here in this hotel?
The rest of the art is diffused throughout the semi-sprawling hotel, lining the lobby, the corridors of each floor, and the lone, usually unbusy hallways of the banquet and conference rooms. Given the irregular situations where one encounters the art (walking to the pool, a restaurant, or the hotel room), there isn’t the same hushed reverence as a standard museum. The Alfond generates an engagement uninhibited and ungoverned by museum protocol and etiquette, instead supplanted by freely-chosen encounters with certain pieces that, for whatever reason, demand one’s gaze and attention, however fleeting or intense.
Languid diners at the upscale wine bar with $22 cigars and $15 glasses of wine and thoughtfully designed utensils sit across from Jonathon Monk’s This Painting (Pollock). The piece plainly states, “This painting should ideally be hung too close to a Jackson Pollock” in an unadorned serif font. An abstracted vase has been reduced to a black square, lines sticking out and topped by imperfect purple spheres representative of flowers. The mildly wine-drunk patrons eat salads, talk loudly, and glance around the room enveloped in conceptual artwork.
On the way to the second-floor pool is Bambi and Davis, a collage by Pawel Przewlocki that self-consciously commentates on its status as artwork: “THESE PIECES CONTAIN REFERENCES TO THE STILL LIFE, THE SELF-PORTRAIT, TEXT AND POP-CULTURE.” In the middle of the piece is a visually discordant cut-out photograph of the artist looking half-seriously at the viewer (described by a friend as resembling “clip art”); a text bubble stating “Seriously!”; and a cartoon Bambi edging towards a realistically rendered deer skull, atop a background of multi-colored stripes. Przewlocki’s collage represents a vision of contemporary art repeated throughout the hotel: the irreducible tension between populist entertainment and high art, somber intellectual self-seriousness and playful irreverence. This same tension is impressively balanced, on the first floor, in Gonzalo Fuenmayo’s God Bless Latin America—which presents a stunningly hyper-realistic “20th Century Fox” logo, meticulously drawn on paper in charcoal, with the text replaced by the piece’s name: “God Bless Latin America.”
In the extended lobby is a color-coordinated mini-library featuring assorted books on art theory, criticism, gender studies, literature, and the occasional obscure academic tome such as Chinese Economic Transition and International Marketing Strategy. On the other side of the lobby is a dead-end hallway displaying the Alfond photography collection. At the very end, near a staff-only door, there is Carrie Mae Weem’s Woman with Daughter, capturing posed scenes of a daughter and mother—with Weem herself as the mother. The tripartite set of photographs depicts the daughter and mother exchanging intense, expressive stares and working on separate, unspecified tasks with open books (homework, studying, or research) around a dinner table. Unlike the textual pieces, Weem’s entirely pictorial work cannot “speak for itself”: the scenes leave the viewer with a sense of ambivalence, yet nonetheless relay the fraught complexities involved in the mother-daughter bond.
I left the hotel itself with a sense of ambivalence, a product of the dual missions of (non-profit) capital and pedagogy converging in one space. Any museum must balance its mission of making art accessible to the public with the demand to pay the air conditioning bills. But when a university space becomes a hotel, new challenges—and opportunities—emerge. For the Alfond, one may wonder if the hotel’s sweeping pedagogic project is, at times, negated by its luxury, meaning the art acts as symbols of status rather than contemplation. However, despite this possibility, the Alfond manages to remain bound to a larger educational purpose: no matter how a guest interacts with the artwork, the money supplies scholarship recipients an opportunity to gain an education. Because of this funding structure, along with the hotel’s curated “visual syllabus,” the Alfond Inn is more comparable to the campus elevator than the sports stadium.
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Teddy Duncan Jr.