Jewel of a Stay – Hassayampa Inn

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With its ruby red bricks and courtyard, a lobby with a perfectly preserved shining tile floor, and a carefully staff-operated elevator, the Hassayampa Inn in Prescott, Ariz. is an elegant, old-fashioned gem.

Lovingly cared for, the lobby features a beautiful mural painted over a burnished fireplace, comfortable reading chairs and warmly lit  lamps, and best of all, a convivial atmosphere that makes guests feel welcome and then less like guests and more like welcome visitors.

Located in the historic downtown area of Prescott, Arizona, a short stroll from the galleries, dining, and historic saloons of Whiskey Row, the Hassayampa maintains a lustrous dignity, formal without being fussy.

The hotel’s history glows as much as the hotel iteself. This is not a new, slap-dash construction chain motel, but a stately travel oasis for 95 years, exuding its history with grace. Designed in the 1920s by El Paso architect Henry Trost, Prescott townspeople bought shares in the project at $1 each, making the location a gathering spot for the community as well as for visitors even before it was completed in 1927.

Today, the building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A member of the Historic Hotels of America, the hotel was a  2022 finalist in The Historic Hotels of America Awards of Excellence, a standout among over 300 entries for the award.  The hotel was a finalist for Best Small Historic Inn/Hotel (Under 75 Guestrooms) as well as for best historic restaurant, hotelier of the year and ambassador of the year. The accolades are deserved.

The Apache name Hassayampa translates more or less as “the river loses itself,” just as the Hassayampa River north of Prescott does, sinking below the ground on its journey toward the sea. But the river’s namesake hotel is in no danger of being lost. With excellent service from the cheerful staff taking turns as elevator operators to the waitstaff at the hotel’s stained-glass-adorned Peacock Room restaurant, the Hassayampa seems destined to appeal to generations of travelers.

Just as it once drew luminaries such as Georgia O’Keefe and Will Rogers, it certainly drew us. The rooms are charming and offer modern comforts – a terrific mattress, flat screen TV, and good Internet, too. Cozy and well appointed, offering features such as a soft carpet with Native American patterning, burnished wood furnishings, deep maroon duvet and arm chairs, the rooms are also quiet – we did not hear our neighbors once.

 

The architecture throughout the hotel is a delight, ranging from Spanish Colonial Revival to Italianate features. Ceilings are handpainted; glass is etched, mosaics line tables, embossed copper panels are polished to a sheen. The courtyard offers outdoor dining in warm weather, and there is live music on weekends.

We traveled in February, and although there was a chill in the air outside, the hotel has a way of making one feel warm and cossetted. A romance package for Valentine’s Day includes breakfast along with touches like chocolate covered strawberries and champagne or sparkling cider add to the ambiance, making February a particularly great time to visit. Sunny days and crisp nights are the typical weather forecast – and were what we experienced as well, with a few patches of snow still frosting the ground.

We loved walking from the hotel into the heart of Prescott’s historic downtown, exploring Courthouse Square and stopping in for a drink at The Palace Bar, which like the Hassayampa itself, is packed full of history. Wyatt Earp and his brothers as well as Doc Holliday once imbibed there. The Sharlot Hall Museum offered interesting insight into the area’s history; Watson Lake provided easy, attractive hiking on trails that weave among large granite boulders.

There are some excellent lunch spots in Prescott, such as The  Local, where we enjoyed a terrific Beyond burger, and the restaurant’s signature grilled cheese, crafted from Havarti and pimento cheeses.

It’s a sandwich worth stopping for. The Greek salad with Israeli couscous and feta is another standout. But the best part: fresh limeade. The Local is a convivial spot with tables inside and out, and fast, friendly service.

But don’t  miss dinner at the Hassyampa. The art deco-style setting is perfect, the understated elegance and warmth that permeate the hotel itself are just as prevalent here, drawing visitors and locals alike with a changing array of beautifully plated entrees. Dishes such as scallops, rainbow trout and a roasted chili poblano – filled with leaks, corn, spaghetti and squash, vie for attention with classically prepared steaks. The restaurant also serves a heady brunch with delightfully decadent treats such as lemon souffle pancakes.  And, one Sunday a month, there’s an afternoon tea, which we need to return to experience.

Although there are many reasons to call the Hassayampa Inn a jewel – it’s history, the friendly staff, the beautifully preserved historic features – it’s all these facets that will make you want to visit this gem in a perfect setting – a thriving small town with plenty of history of its own nestled in the Bradshaw Mountains, the distinctive Thumb Butte, luring us out and up through the pines on its trails.

With a setting like that for a treasured historic hotel, why wait? We loved our February visit, and I highly recommend booking a stay during the  post-holiday season, or come in the spring for the Smoki Museum’s indigenous art festival,  attend a free June bluegrass festival, or enjoy the thrills of the world’s oldest rodeo in July.  Just save a room for us!

  • Genie Davis; photos – Genie Davis 

 

 

Harrison Love Shows Us the Way

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The Hidden Way is a a beautifully illustrated novel containing myths and legends culled from travels into the Amazon.  13 years in the making, Harrison Love’s book offers a rich understanding of indigenous cultures,  and a deep dive into the purpose of making art, which in his own words, “preserves a sense of the divine.”

That spiritual journey is what infuses the book, through Illustrations as meaningful as words. It is in all ways a lovely and lovingly told journey. The illustrations were created using lineloeum and woodblock printing, with each print colored using techniques from watercolor to spray paint and stencils. There is a sense of myth making and creating in these images as well as woven throughout the text.

As poetic as it is compelling, the book not only follows a journey, it depicts and creates its own.  “The stars returned to their daytime hiding places. Each day upon realizing that they were still alone in the wilderness, relying upon something so fleeting as a dream to guide them, the absurdity of their circumstances gave way to panic,” Love writes.

To some extent serving as Love’s doppelgange, the character of Khay traverses many places and mystical spaces.  Toward the end of the book, she is told, “You were chosen because you are a good student of the old ways, and because you value the power of myth. You seek knowledge with a clear altruism…” This is appears to be what Love hopes for the reader as well.

Along with a spiritual quest, the book also serves as an environmental one, referencing more than once the destruction of the jungle. “We cannot feel the moments of time pass until we recognize the last of them, when we have little time left. We were told that every day our own people cut into the jungle and lay waste the soil that their ancestors had tended…”

In terrible concert with the loss of the natural world, another loss hovers over the book, equally as powerfully heartbreaking. “Without our stories, we too may have our way of life lost to the deserts of time.”

The Hidden Way seeks to illiuminate those stories, retelling them in an immersive, sometimes feverish unspooling.  It reconstructs the mysths told among the tribes of the Peruvian Amazon and other Shamanic peoples. According to Love, some specific shamanistic myths were included from cultures outside Peru in order to reveal the loss of some of these traditional practices.

Shamanism itself is considered to be a study of the self, conjoined with a belief in the spiritual realm that is hidden from the human eye, but according to the author it can also be sought “in the depths of meditation or introspection,” or in the pages of this book.

The work itself unfolds as if through a meditative trance; it is a dance of words that follows a rhythm unusual in its variance between action and dream-like description. This is not to say that the book is difficult or histrionic; and while Love says it was written to pay tribute to the heritage of Shamanic teaching, a heritage too often disregarded, it is also not a history tome.

Rather, it serves as tribute and eulogy, connection and hope, revealing a culture and its stories in an immediate and absorbing fashion. Within these stories, there are spirits and quests, silence and energetic action, portents and promises. It is a kaleidoscopic story, filled with both an urgent immediacy and a profound respect for the mysterious wisdom and the practices it describes within the story.

A travel book like no other and a poem to past and future, inner being and the adventurous heart, The Hidden Way definitively takes readers on quite a journey.

Love is a painter, author, illustrator, and skilled muralist. The book he has created here is a mural of words,  guiding the reader through a search for wisdom, power, and above all else, the redemption of a new beginning. Highly unique, the book can be favorably compared to the works of Carlos Castaneda. Those with a mystic heart and a taste for adventure, read on.

  • Genie Davis; images and advance copy provided by the book’s author

 

 

A Radical Dawn Rises

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Luna Anais Gallery presents a luminous the group exhibition curated by Alicia Piller, Radical Dawn, a series of mixed media works which simply radiate light.

Among the pieces on display are a provocative new look at a city scape as seen from the bumper of a car – as if the headlights had eyes; a floral landscape of fabric with neon igniting behind it; and glowy sculptures and paintings. Artists include Se Young Au, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Anais Franco, Silvi Naci, Ginger Q, Jaklin Romine, Molly Shea, Sarah Stephana Smith, Linnea Spransy and Kayla Tange.

Reinforcing the Luna Anais mission to exhibit female and nonbinary artists, primarily those local to Southern California, the exhibition focuses on these ten artists meditative and spiritual approaches in many of the pieces on display.

Molly Jo Shea’s “Excited Over Nothing” is an air dancer covered in sequins and beads, hand applied during the pandemic. As the inflated figure rises and dramatically falls, wonderfully depicting the hope and despair of pandemic times, the magic of this work is not just its green and silver shine but its exuberance. Even if the face of dark depression, something glitters.

Silva Naci’s work utilizes natural elements in uniquely distinctive ways.  “Untitled (Pussy)” uses an exuberantly bright color palette of vivid blue and lemon yellow in wool and natural dyes using a process that harkens back to the artist’s Albanian ancestors, and their traditional weavers. It pops with color and an almost hypnotic sense of motion.

As to Naci’s mid-fire ceramic, “Tabaka (Ass Up),” the concept of a traditional serving tray is upended by the idea of serving up a woman to suitors in a beautiful beige and brown swirling work that resembles both the sweets served to the suitors to help woo them and the open vulnerability of the women being presented.

Also working in ceramic is Anais Franco. Along with wood elements, the sculptural piece “7 C’s of Resilience” offers a delicate complexity in its poetic and symbolic approach to memory and connection. The almost impossibly detailed, beautiful work is both ritualistic and transcendent.

Sarah Stefana Smith presents a screen, monofilament, bird netting and thread weaving in “Flag to the Aybss No. 3” a surreal flag-like hanging that appears both mystical and futuristic, a kind of magical approach to time warps, black holes, and other undefinable regions of the universe, both external and personal.

More concretely delineated but no less magical are two works by Jessica Taylor Bellamy, her ethereal resin and wire “Palm Veil” suspended over “Ecology IV: Horizons of Manic Striving and Photogenic Decline,” an impressive sculpture of a repurposed BMW bumper, video projected images of city scape, and dried wildflowers. Positioned well in the gallery space with La Brea Ave. as an outdoor backdrop, the bumper appears to have come in off the street, and the viewer to be experiencing what the disembodied vehicle itself may have seen.

Wood, clay, and plexiglass are the “Vessels of Memory. Emotional bodies. Moments of loss transcend. (Haunted Scream Bowls)” created by Kayla Tange. These are delicate, even gloriously poetic sculptures about memory, sentiment, love, and pain. Impossibly fragile looking, reflective in the plexiglass elements, they are as poetic as their title.

Se Young Au takes immersion to a new level with scented elements contained in a glass covered, white porcelain flower, over which are hung poly satin blocks of archival digital prints in her “Inexhaustible Abundance, Form 1.”

To the viewer, there is a sense of elegy and haunting sadness; the artist’s explanation leads one to into a look at not only grief but that within the context of the damages wrought by U.S. imperialist dominance.

Two artists, Jaklin Romine and Ginger Q created “Efflorescence Grip-Con Luz,” the fabric and neon piece that asks us to explore perception in its depiction of hands holding flowers suspended against the curved neon.

And Linnea Spransy’s acrylic on canvas “Patience” (above) looks at remembrance and attainment of “good death” against the context of the modern world in a mysteriously patterned divided image of dark and light that seems to represent both the Heavenward and the Hellbound paths as a kind of intricate puzzle. Spransy’s work in this exhibition is just one of the light-infused standouts.

Collectively, the exhibition is filled with motion and suffused with light, a tribute to grief, loss, change, and a sense of passage. That passage may lead through life, change the course of a life, impose dictates of social mores and rules on life, pull us from our purpose or path, but along the road, however rough, there is the chance at a transition, a journey out of darkness or sorrow or containment into a new day, one in which constraints are lifted, pasts celebrated, and futures more tentatively hopeful.

What we may see in the beams of our own headlights, in the sheen of our own neon is a Radical Dawn, lighting and igniting a new way forward.

With that in mind, Piller’s curatorial first exhibition for Luna Anais is a great place to spend at least a portion of the July 4th weekend, with artists, curator and a wine reception on July 2nd from 2 to 6 p.m.

The exhibition is located in the D2 Art space at 1205 North La Brea Avenue in Inglewood, CA 90302 and is open every Thursday-Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. through July 10th.

  • Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis

The Spiritual Vision of Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise

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Art fills the soul as well as the eyes in the poetic Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery. Curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic with Mika Cho, the four-gallery exhibition is a deep dive into what makes us human, and what makes each human who they are.

Participating artists include Enrique Castrejon, Serena JV Elston, Anita Getzler, Jason Jenn, Ibuki Kuramochi, Marne Lucas, Trinh Mai, Vojislav Radovanović, Hande Sever,  Marval A Rex, Kayla Tange, Nancy Kay Turner, and Jessica Wimbley.

The works are each, in their own way, about the connective tissue of ancestry and relationships, identity, and history – both genealogical and spiritual. Some honor family, both those of our bloodlines and those chosen long after birth. Others focus on exploring present hopes and past dreams. There are images that witness loss, honor mentors, explore sexuality, refer to tragedies, relate to purpose, and search for true essence of being alive.

Primarily mixed media in terms of medium, these works are as layered visually as they are with meaning. While each artist’s creation can stand on its own, the interaction between the works is important here. There is real effort in not just bringing the art together in visual conversation, but in allowing viewers and artists alike to explore the power of personal understanding.

The show’s title suggests, according to the curators, that “Collectively, we are the ancestors of tomorrow’s sunrise and someday we shall all be but a memory.” As viewers, we pass unseen as ghosts in front of each, very much alive, work. Conversely, we are also participants in future memories of our own, involved in the immersive experience of viewing, and in our own individual inchoate ways, seeking to share and preserve what we’ve seen.

The large-scale work from Enrique Castrejon, “The Realization You are Losing Your Memory with Frequent Confusion and Disorientation” is a part of a larger series about his father’s chronic illnesses and dementia. Having served as a caregiver during his father’s illness, Castrejon’s electrifying image portrays a deconstructed human body in fragmented shapes, parts linked with artists tape and thumbtacks in a spidery vein-like web of concern, chaos, love, and loss. Strips of printed data from Alzehimer’s Los Angeles stripe the body parts like the wrappings on mummies.

Loss is also at the center of Hande Sever’s “2 or 3 Things I know About Her.” Walnut frames, appearing to represent coffins support and envelope a series of photographs. The photos are reenactments of her young mother’s arrest as a political prisoner during Turkey’s 1980 right-wing junta. It’s a powerful statement on identity and purpose, as well as on politics supported by the U.S. as a military business.

Vojislav Radovanovic’s “Years Devoured by Locusts” also examines the implications of imprisonment and generational trauma, as well as referencing climate change and our imprisoningly slow reaction to it. It’s a graceful work using natural elements such as a wasp nest and tree branches to create a scene that echoes both desolation and beauty. Broken mirror fragments spill like drying water under a tree derelict of leaves, analog television sets play a mix of nature images and static, signifying the potential loss of all these living things, but a wasp honeycomb revolves on a small stand with colored lights, a tiny rainbow of hope that life may still find a way.

Trinh Mai’s “Begins with Tea” takes up a front wall in the exhibition, family photos printed on joss paper, and held, along with seeds, herbs, dried noodles, and grain inside Mai’s grandmother’s used tea bags. Poignant and elegiac, the installation represents the stories about family and friends told by her grandmother over afternoon tea. The delicate, almost ephemeral tea bag pouches are as fragile as the remembrances they contain and steeped in love. A soft, barely-there scent of tea envelopes the wall on which the bags are hung with sewing needles that also belonged to the artist’s grandmother.

Also paying tribute to domestic rituals, is the largest of Nancy Kay Turner’s several fine works here, “Burnt Offerings.” Using parchment paper stained from the bread Turner baked on it during the pandemic, she adds gold leaf, glitter spray, vintage sheet music and paper tree bark among other materials collaging and painting them over the parchment. The result is a series of overlaid impressions, both abstract art and moments of hope and sorrow. Like Biblical burnt offerings, the archival work traces a period of great loss and sacrifice and creates an almost holy elegy from the act of making bread. Turner’s work also has a sub-context of another burnt offering altogether, that of those lost to flame in the Holocaust and at Hiroshima.

Anita Getzler’s “Pieces of Mourning” is direct about its heartbreaking memorial for genocide and imprisonment. There are crushed rose petals and broken rose thorns in small jars, thorny branches wrapped in bronze wire, memorial yahrzeit candle holders containing old watches – like those taken from Holocaust victims – with the faces of the watches holding more crushed petals. Getzler also includes a scroll featuring the names of those sent to concentration camps when deported from a French village. As a memoir of stories told to the artist by her parents, who were themselves holocaust survivors, it is deeply moving. As a work of art, it is a stunning mix of dark textures illuminated with the flickering glow of the brass wires, an electric yahrzeit lamp, and a spirit of love.

Brighter notes are sounded in Jason Jenn’s “sharing a seat with the poets,” depicting a mentor/mentee relationship, a tribute to chosen family. Arrayed along a settee, are precious minerals, plants and books. Colorful light plays with shadows on these special objects chosen to represent knowledge and growth, wisdom, and joy. Pillows on the floor represent the seating or and a conversation between the parties in the relationship, and a sense of warmth and love pervades the sculptural grouping.

In the exhibition’s darkroom, Kayla Tange’s “A Chance to Be Seen” glows. A sculptural display of illuminated documents of her adoption and letters between herself and her mother, the piece explores the complications of origin, human commodification, and the potency of artistic transformation. Ibuki Kuramochi’s “Prenatal Memory and Species” turns toward a larger picture, going beyond the personal to evolution, the maternal process, and the beginning of human life in her mysterious and evocative mix of projected media, chains, and a silicone pregnant belly. Expressing a fascinating connection between personal longing Serena JV Elston’s sculpture “Elemental Hunger” is among several richly involving works by the artist. As with other works in the exhibition, there is a visceral element, here the heat from the electric hot plate coil serving as the spiral center to the piece. Jessica Wimbley offers a beautiflu video collage that explores spiritual and physical edges, in “Edges.” The piece uses hair as a space for memory and storytelling.

Other works not discussed in depth are equally intrinsic parts of Memories of Tomorrow’s Sunrise, including a series of fine porcelain sculptures by Marne Lucas and vibrant mixed media from Marval A. Rex connecting mind to body.

Exhibiting artists and co-curators with gallery director Mika Cho, Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic

While many artists have created work that recalls dark events, the overall experience of the exhibition is that of hope and resilience. If art is a mirror, this mirror reflects memories, including and perhaps especially the traumatic ones, and alchemizes them with the magic that makes us human. Art grants artist and viewer alike the strength of spirit that allows us to take a good long look into the past, which is, after all, what today will be – tomorrow.

The exhibition runs through July 15th, with a closing event that day; a Zoom artist talk is set for June 28th, and an in-person performance scheduled for July 6th. The Ronald H. Silverman Gallery is located in the California State University campus Fine Arts Building.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis