Besides being a hotel, La Posada is home to host and artist Tina Mion, whose studio is located inside the building itself. When I went to La Posada with the small group from my school, we were fortunate enough to meet the artist herself, who personally showed us around the historic hotel and explained to us many of her paintings which are on display there in a gallery. Our group was even given the opportunity by Mion to enter her studio, a secluded area of the hotel never open to the public, and get a feel of the place where her creation occurs. Upon experiencing her work, I was immediately drawn to the surreal appearance of the paintings and the symbols that are embedded into her work. The stories of the hardship that she had once had to face during her lifetime in order to be successful as a fine artist were nothing short of inspiring. While Mion expresses a handful of themes, the major one that dominates her art is simply the idea of death. Though conveying dark subjects, such as suicide, Tina Mion's paintings almost never lack humorous aspects. Her other work includes histories, parodies, and commentaries on the nature of humans and politics. Tina Mion is a name that is known throughout the art world, and her portrait of first lady, Jackie Kennedy, was purchased by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and remains there in their permanent collection.
To conclude our tour of La Posada, we were able to dine at the restaurant located inside of the hotel, called the Turquoise Room. The food that is served there are the creations of an award-winning chef, and integrates flavors of the Southwest and of Mexico, which echos the very spirit of the hotel. I ordered a dish called 'The Killer Vegetable Platter', and despite it's diabolical name, it was delicious, containing steamed vegetables, grilled tofu, a sweet corn tamale, red mashed potatoes, a mild chili stuffed with three cheeses, wild mushroom corn custard, a crispy fried egg roll (filled with red, brown, and black sticky rice), and to top it off, freshly grilled corn. Like that sentence, it was quite the mouthful. I'm assuming the restaurant itself was a fairly fancy place too, because when I ordered an ice tea, I had to choose the flavor I wanted (I decided to try blackberry sage; it was a very good choice on my part) and they brought me a glass filled with ice and a 16 oz glass bottle which contained the actual tea for me to pour. Being a meal that we, as students, didn't have to pay for, we obviously had to order something for dessert as well. Our waitress suggested we try the double chocolate, grand marnier soufflé, which apparently would suffice for three whole people. The name of that dessert definitely lead us to form some pretty high expectations, and we were not even minutely disappointed! After taking in our last glimpses of La Posada and the fascinating paintings by Tina Mion, we departed the hotel and Winslow, Arizona after approximately six hours of refreshing art, architecture, fine cuisine, and history.
A New Year's Party In Purgatory For Suicides by Tina Mion from David Herzberg on Vimeo.
