Belmond La Residencia on Spain’s Balearic island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean has been infused with local art for years. The 73-bedroom hotel is in the picturesque village of Deia, which has an official population of 642, of whom about 50 are working artists.
The hotel has its own gallery, with an artist-in-residence, who teaches and advises. It offers daily walking tours, on a complimentary basis, to visit local artists in their own homes.
The hotel’s main village liaison is Cecilie Sheridan, a UK-born painter who, like many of her colleagues, came to Mallorca on vacation, and stayed. She married Boston-born Deia artist George Sheridan, on Mallorca in 1959, and since his passing in 2008 she has, with hotel support, organized the two-yearly George Sheridan Art Prize.
The 2017 theme was The Kiss in Art, and Cecilie Sheridan and her four judges, who came from various parts of the Spanish mainland, were looking for composition, form and technique.
The winner, announced September 26, is Alice Meyer Wallace, who has been working in Deia since poet Robert Graves persuaded her to buy a small house there in 1965.
Hotel GM Ulisses Marreiros, who handed over a check from the hotel for €1,000 (US$1,174), pointed out that Wallace is, coincidentally, one of two artists already scheduled to open an exhibition in the hotel’s gallery on September 29 (her own Kiss painting, a mixed media using collage, crayon and paint, sold immediately at the award cocktail).
Roughly half the award-party’s 120 guests, all enjoying Spanish Cava bubbly and canapés, were artists or other Deia residents. “We also invited all our hotel guests – we host a management party anyway, every Tuesday – as it was a great way to show that we really do interact with the fascinating locale. I believe such immersion contributes to our repeat factor of 40%,” Marreiros explained.