California’s Beloved di Rosa Art Center Is Reborn With a Love Letter to ‘Incorrect’ Art

Six years ago, things looked bleak for the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California. The organization had announced plans to deaccession the 1,600 works in its holdings—the world’s foremost collection of Post-war Northern California art—sparking an outcry from the arts community. But last month, the di Rosa kicked off an exciting new chapter in its history with the opening of a new art space in downtown San Francisco, with an exhibition celebrating its once-imperiled holdings.

Titled “Far Out: Northern California Art,” the show features important artists from the region such as Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953), Peter Saul (b. 1934), Viola Frey (1933–2004), Roy De Forest (1930–2007), and Jay DeFeo (1929–1989). It is an eclectic mix of work bound together by a radical and progressive ethos that characterized Northern California counterculture throughout the 20th century—at San Francisco’s first museum dedicated to the region’s art.

“Visitors have cried and said ‘it feels like seeing old friends again,’” Twyla Ruby, the di Rosa’s curator of exhibitions and programs, told me during a tour of the show. “People really seem to be emotionally affected by seeing this collection together again in this way, and it’s been really beautiful.

And it’s a rebirth not only for the di Rosa, but also for the space it has taken over at the Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. The galleries there—owned by local arts patrons Deborah and Andy Rappaport—have sat empty since 2023, with the closure of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, which for six years staged excellent contemporary art exhibitions there drawn from the collection of Nion McEvoy. Where the Bay Area once seemed at risk of losing two beloved institutions, one has come roaring back against the odds.

Who Was Rene di Rosa?

The di Rosa’s founder was the eccentric winemaker-turned-art collector Rene di Rosa. In 1960, long before Napa became a famous wine region, he purchased 465 acres of land there, and enrolled in viticulture classes at UC Davis, outside Sacramento. What he learned at school helped di Rosa rehabilitate the rundown vineyard on his property. (He named it Winery Lake Vineyards, after a small pond on the property that he had enlarged, and eventually sold grapes to more than 50 wineries.)

But di Rosa also caught the art collecting bug at school, where the instructors included the likes of Manuel Neri (b. 1930), Robert Arneson (1930–1992), and William T. Wiley (1937–2021)—three important area artists included in the current exhibition.

“Most of the courses in viticulture were so beyond me I would end up going to the art department to hang out,” di Rosa told Coast News. The first piece he ever bought was by Bruce Conner (1933–2008).

Di Rosa and his wife, the artist Veronica di Rosa (1934–1991) became key Bay Area arts patrons, befriending artists and serving on the board of trustees at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1983, the couple established the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation. With the profits from the reportedly $8-to-$10-million sale of the vineyards to Seagrams in 1986, they worked to turn their remaining 217-acre property into an art park. Veronica died in a tragic hiking accident in 1991, but the di Rosa Preserve: Art and Nature, as it was originally known, opened to the public in 1997, a hidden gem with galleries and an impressive sculpture meadow overseen by a towering Mark di Suvero (b. 1933).

Di Rosa called his collection “the incorrect museum,” priding himself on operating outside the stuffy confines of the mainstream art world to capture something of Northern California’s rebellious counterculture. And while some critics may have dismissed his holdings as merely a display of wacky Bay Area aesthetics, di Rosa’s collection could also be quite serious, works with political gravitas created by artists with a distinct anti-capitalist vein.

A New Path Forward 

Trouble started with the 2008 recession, which wiped out nearly a quarter of the nonprofit’s endowment, forcing layoffs. Two years later, di Rosa died at age 91. Without him, the art center struggled to make its way, and to care for the expansive collection he had left behind. The 2017 wildfires, which caused damage on the property, including a storage barn, raised further concerns about the di Rosa’s long-term future.

Under director Robert Sain, appointed in 2015, the center made the difficult decision to break up the collection. There simply wasn’t enough money in the budget, he said, to host exhibitions and programming as well as covering maintenance costs for the historic artworks, especially with so many large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures.

That could have been the end of the story—but the dark days of deaccessioning came to an end in 2021. The people’s voice was heard, and Kate Eilertsen, who had been appointed as Sain’s successor the previous summer, promised a renewed commitment to the collection.

Under her leadership, the di Rosa has made every effort to bring its art to the people, opening a small satellite space, di Rosa Downtown, in the heart of Napa in late 2024. The di Rosa has even begun collecting again, picking up the story of the region’s contemporary art scene where its founder left off.

“We really want to make this into the world’s foremost collection of Northern California,” Ruby said.

Recent acquisitions include 10 works each by Clayton Bailey (1939–2020) and his wife Betty Bailey (1939–2019), the subject of a joint show that closed this past weekend at di Rosa Downtown in Napa. He is known for his fantastical sculptures depicting monsters and other creatures—and his alter ego, Dr. Gladstone, who would help children excavate their so-called remains—while she created works on paper and ceramics.

The expansion to San Francisco is the next step in the di Rosa’s revitalization, which also looks to bring an increased revenue source by hosting weddings and other events on the center’s picturesque grounds. And the hope is that the space in the city will introduce new audiences to the di Rosa, and encourage them to make the trip to Napa to learn more.

“The board felt strongly that the first exhibition should really be a showcase of the collection, but in the future, the collection will serve as a jumping-off point for more novel, scholarly, and focused curatorial presentations,” Ruby said.

A Celebration of the Incorrect

“Far Out” is kind of a greatest hits of the di Rosa collection: Funk, Conceptual art, ceramics from the California Clay movement, assemblage, and even figurative painting.

“We wanted to spark dialogue about the art history that’s in the collection,” Ruby said.

She and Eilertsen have broken up the exhibition into three sections: “Material Worlds,” exploring California artists’ embrace of different mediums as a means of expression; “Tricksters, Scavengers, and Scamps,” which looks the use of second identities and unconventional, sometimes salvaged materials; and “Piracy and Protest,” featuring works that critique American culture and politics through the appropriation of corporate mottos and logos. Mickey Mouse, for instance, is a recurring image.

“It’s either a weird fetish on Rene di Rosa’s part, or, more likely, it’s because Mickey represented a capitalistic order that Northern California artists were poking fun at and subverting,” Ruby added, pointing to a lithograph by Wiley of the Disney character with a cryogenic tank that accompanied a performance series by the artist about the urban legend that Walt Disney had his remains cryogenically frozen.

Other highlights range from Conceptual artist Paul Kos’s (b. 1942) sculpture , a coat hanger with bells on each end, precariously balanced atop a broomstick, to Joan Brown’s (1938–1990), (1975), a vibrant painting of a woman in a robe and shower cap and her little dog posed against the bright turquoise of the bathroom tiles. (She had a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective that opened at SFMOMA in 2022.)

David Best (b. 1945), known for his ornate, ephemeral Burning Man temples, is represented here with a large, 3-D cut-paper collage titled (2000) that the artist once estimated took 900 hours to make. Made from appropriated 19th-century magazine illustrations, it depicts the deadly 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy that led to reform in factory working conditions.

“This one really reflects the labor politics that courses through the collection in ways that people don’t always think about,” Ruby said.

Striking a related note is , a 1982 screenprint by Ester Hernández (b. 1944) that offers a play on the well-known Sun Maid raisins logo. The artist has replaced the young woman holding the overflowing basket of grapes with a skeleton, in a condemnation of the dangerous pesticides used to grow the fruit, and the health risks such chemicals pose for farmworkers.

There are also artists in the show who even Ruby is still learning more about, like Nancy Youdelman, who was one of the students who made work for “Womanhouse,” the landmark feminist art installation created by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and Miriam Schapiro’s (1923–2015) groundbreaking CalArts Feminist Art Program in Los Angeles. She turned a second-hand dress into a mixed media sculpture, (2000), adorning it with found beads and other jewelry, turning the soft and feminine into a protective sheath.

And then there are works that had fallen into disrepair over the decades. A pair of model ships by Sandow Birk (b. 1962), sails emblazoned with the IBM and American Express logos, had gotten lost in a di Rosa storage barn, but have now been restored.

The two works are being shown for the first time alongside his post-apocalyptic seascape, in which galleons attack a massive battleship on which is perched the SFMOMA, representing corporate interests attacking the museum. (Painted in 1998, it notably predates the arrival of the Fisher Collection, from the founders of the Gap clothing empire.)

There’s also one piece on view that is currently in the collection—the curators have actually included one of the deaccessioned artworks, amid discussions to potentially bring the work back into the fold. Titled (2002), it’s a heaping mound of scissors, corkscrews, matchbooks, and other objects confiscated by the fledgling Transportation Security Administration at San Francisco International Airport in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks.

The artist, Michele Pred (b. 1966), made the drive up to Napa from Oakland to collect the deaccessioned work on Valentine’s Day in 2017. The bins it had been stored in were cracked and spilling onto the floor after years of neglect. When she made the work, Pred had been working as a limo driver. She was inspired by picking up passengers who complained about the new travel restrictions and the things taken by TSA. It took months of negotiating, and signing a release of liability waiver, but eventually Pred convinced the airport to let her have some of the seized belongings.

“I realized how emotional and how frightening this experience was. So I started thinking about freedoms being taken away, surveillance culture, and this sort of security theater,” Pred, who staged a performance at the exhibition on September 11, told me. “It’s really a time capsule of our history then, but it’s still very timely, with not just items, but people being taken away now and being sent out of the country.”

Pred had met di Rosa while studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the two became friends. The acquisition of was a major career milestone for Pred as an emerging artist. When she got a letter from the di Rosa in late 2016, telling her to pick up her piece or it would be thrown away, it was nothing short of heartbreaking—and to have the di Rosa embrace the piece once more is particularly meaningful.

“They’ve welcomed me back with open arms,” Pred said. “They recognize how important Rene and his artist friends were to the whole culture of the di Rosa, and they are carrying forward the excitement and the passion that Rene had for this collection.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com