‘We the People’ art project at di Rosa greets passersby

If you drive past the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art at night on Highway 121 in Napa, you’ll see a big face looking down at you from the hill. Glance again, and you’ll see that face morph into another face, and then another.

Don’t worry. It’s not eye fatigue. It’s art.

Public art installations and outdoor exhibits have been with us for a long time, but not many of them move, and not like this.

Titled “We the People,” the video projection, created by Napa photographer Jock McDonald, has been visible from 6 to 10 p.m. on the back of the di Rosa building, facing the highway, since mid-February and will remain on display through April 21.

During his long career, McDonald’s celebrity portraits include Robin Williams, Dan Rather, Jessie Jackson, Rosa Parks, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mondavi, Daniel Ellsberg, Ray Bradbury and food luminaries M.F.K. Fisher and Alice Waters. But he also seeks out subjects who are not famous.

The faces in “We the People” represent diverse ethnic backgrounds and ages.

“I have spent 25 years photographing people from all over the world,” McDonald said. “Humans inhabiting this planet with so many others often forget all the things we have in common and share with each other.”

The message of “We the People” is that humans are ultimately more alike than they are different. In creating the project, the photographer sought a symbolically broad sample of humankind.

“There are 52 black-and-white portraits in ‘We The People.’ The portraits are of a portion of the San Francisco Glide Memorial Church’s congregation,” McDonald said.

“The call to participate was sent out to all of Glide’s congregation. The portraits were done in August 2021. The portraits were taken in the outside parking lot of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco in a makeshift outdoor studio,” he explained

“’We The People” was first projected on San Francisco City Hall during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. The same images are currently being projected at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art.

The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is an art park and nature preserve that features multiple galleries, sculpture gardens and a 35-acre lake, located on 217 acres in Napa Valley’s Carneros region. It was opened to the public in 1997.

The center was founded by Rene di Rosa, a journalist, vineyardist and art collector, who lived on the grounds. He was also McDonald’s stepfather.

In 1974, di Rosa married the photographer’s mother, Veronica Pridham McDonald, a Canadian-born painter and sculptor.

“I was sent to Brentwood College school on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, when I was 12 years old and attended there for grades eight through 12,” McDonald said.

“I graduated in 1979, but on vacations I would come down to live with my mother and Rene for Christmas and summer vacations,” he recalled.

Rene di Rosa died in 2010 at the age of 91.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On X @danarts.