Di Rosa art museum celebrates Napa homecoming for pieces saved during 2017 wildfires

Standing in a newly finished exhibit hall, amid a chaos of wooden crates, oversized cardboard boxes and odd shapes wrapped in plastic, Kate Eilertsen beamed with satisfaction.

“Every day has been like Christmas here.”

It has been that way since spring, when the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa finally was able to begin bringing home its art from Oakland, where most of the 1,600 pieces of Rene di Rosa’s wildly eclectic collection had been stored since the 2017 wildfires.

That year as October fires swept through Napa and Sonoma counties, coming dangerously close to the 217-acre di Rosa art and nature preserve in Carneros, it was a mad dash to save the art, Eilertsen said.

“Only a few of the outdoor sculptures were damaged,” she said.

For Eilertsen, bringing the art home has been a priority ever since she became executive director of di Rosa in 2020.

“For one thing, it was costing $160,000 a year to store, with extra charges of $250 to go look at a piece and $550 to move one,” she said. “That’s a lot for a small art center.”

Eilertsen’s first act, however, was to stop the previous director’s plan to deal with the unexpected expense by selling off much of the art. That plan, announced in 2019, caused an uproar of protests.

“The arts world was in shock,” she said. “Artists, galleries, art lovers, everyone was upset at dispersing the notable collection of works by contemporary Northern California artists.

“A couple of the best, most expensive pieces had been sold” before the plan was scuttled, Eilertsen said.

Her next challenge — in addition to surviving a pandemic and bringing visitors back once it was safe — was to figure out how to safely store the art on the site. Eilertsen, who began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, also had opened a museum at Harvard University before moving to California. She worked at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and also was director at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

“I like small museums,” she said of di Rosa, which comprises two exhibit spaces — Gallery 1, by the 17-acre lake, and Gallery 2, a barnlike building farther up the hill — in addition to the art found throughout the grounds.

Eilertsen and her team settled on a plan to transform Gallery 2 into two smaller exhibition rooms and one storage area. The estimated price tag was $400,000, including transportation costs.

Leslie Rota, a docent at di Rosa, jump-started the fundraising with a gift in honor of her late mother, Eloise, who also had been a docent. “She introduced me to the wonder of di Rosa,” Rota said.

Erin and Francis Collins also made significant contributions, and at the December 2022 gala, a Fund-a-Need completed the fundraising. With renovations completed, trucks filled with art started rolling in May.

The two new galleries will host changing exhibitions of the di Rosa collection, Eilertsen said, but they are especially proud of the storage area, which will become part of the visitors’ experience. A floor-to-ceiling window and glass door provides a view of the room where Katie Kime, di Rosa’s collections and exhibitions manager, works.

Right now, her days are filled with unpacking and categorizing art with QR codes.

“It’s a joy to be able to work on this,” Kime said, with the zeal of an archaeologist uncovering previously long-lost works. “There are so many mysteries here because we’ve been working with postage stamp images. We open a box and finally see what it really looks like.”

Eilertsen said their plans include holding classes in the storage area for people to learn how to care for their artworks. “It’s a game-changer,” she said. “It’s a room built on love of this place.”

“There are so many exhibits waiting here. There are so many stories in the collection that we can tell now because we can see the art. From the political to the fantastical to the stoned, they all tell a story of Northern California art.”

The maverick of modern Napa

The unabashedly “incorrect museum” is the lifetime work of Rene di Rosa, one of modern Napa’s more colorful characters, who once showed up at Napa City Hall with his wife, Veronica, to protest land-development policies, both wearing gorilla suits and carrying signs that read, “I’m Ape for the Grape.”

The only child of a St. Louis heiress and an Italian aristocrat, di Rosa was born in 1919 in Boston, where his father was consul general. Early on, he displayed an independent, if flamboyant, approach to life. As a student at Yale, he commissioned his first painting, a female nude, for his room.

In “Local Color,” a collection of essays and images about di Rosa’s world, Tessa DeCarlo writes that as undergrads crowded in to see the new artwork, di Rosa affixed foxtails to strategic areas of the painting and charged a fee to anyone wanting a look beneath them.

Graduating in 1942, di Rosa served in the U.S. Navy and then lived in New York and Paris with a goal of becoming a writer. When a novel eluded him, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and sought out “artists in revolt.”

By 1960 he was tired of the city. He headed north and used an inheritance to buy a ranch, near the Napa-Sonoma county line in Carneros, with a history that fascinated him. Planted to vineyards in 1855, it was established as Debrett Vineyards in 1885 and subsequently shut down, first by phylloxera — a grape pest — and then by Prohibition, although rumors persisted it did produce moonshine whiskey.

Di Rosa set out to re-create an estate he named Winery Lake at a time when Carneros was not the recognized grape-growing region it would become.

He reconditioned the soil, replanted vines, expanded a pond into a 17-acre lake and turned the old stone winery into his residence. He also took classes at UC Davis, but, he wrote in autobiographical notes in “Local Places,” “sometimes getting bored in viticulture classes, I wandered to the art department.”

There, he was struck by the works — and often the humor — of the emerging artists of the 1960s and the thriving art department at Davis, where teachers included William T. Wiley Roy de Forest, Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri.

“I didn’t have the money to collect established artists,” he wrote, “but I took satisfaction in helping artists who were unknown. I wanted to help them become the artist I had failed to become.”

He added, “Wealthy museum trustees, influenced by the museum’s curators, travel to New York to acquire approved art, while many rich New Yorkers still fly to Europe for their art. This attitude aroused my desire to support our neighbors, the creative underdogs.”

As his collection grew, he occasionally purchased art from beyond Northern California, but he maintained his focus on local artists. “The Bay Area is the pond from which I fish,” he said. “Emerging talent is what has always grabbed me.

“What matters to me is what it’s made into, not what it’s made out of,” he wrote. “Multimedia, chewing gum, crab claws, hair, bowling balls, feathers, marbles, brooms, boots and shoes, shirts — pretty much anything — anything that smacks of life. Paint is nice too.”

In 1982, he and Veronica, a Canadian painter, writer and sculptor, sold 250 acres of his Winery Lake vineyards and used the profits to establish the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation with the vision to build an art and nature preserve for the public. After Veronica died in a hiking accident in Normandy in 1991, he said the preserve became “his sustainer.”

It opened to the public in 1997.

One thing that surprised visitors stepping into the fantastic world of di Rosa — in addition to the whimsical, provocative, irreverent works — was the omission of the usual museum notes accompanying the art on display.

Di Rosa explained, “I wish I could remember who said that talking about art is like trying to French kiss over the telephone. The point is words can and do get in the way. They distract more than they illuminate. Knowing who did it when and the title can be interesting on some level. But wall labels do not reveal the work and can be insistent distractions. We allow people to spend their time look and feeling without having to read.”

After di Rosa died in 2010, the nonprofit foundation continued to administer and share with the public the estate Richard von Busack described as “a countercultural Hearst Castle,” a nature preserve, a haven for birders and a spot for picnics. That’s where his art collection is installed everywhere, inside and out, including in the stone house, filled with sculptures and paintings from the ceiling to the shower.

With the collection back at di Rosa, two celebratory exhibitions will open in the new galleries Friday, Sept. 8.

“To the Max! Maximalist Art from the di Rosa Collection” and “Ghost in the Machine” highlight “never-before-exhibited works,” Eilertsen said.

In “To the Max,” she said, “we wanted to do what is fun, what’s joyful. We all need a little positivity right now.”

According to Eilertsen, maximalist art is having a moment in 2023 “as artists, curators and collectors are rejecting minimalist austerity in favor of works jammed with eclectic patterns, colors, textures and forms.”

This maximalist attitude has a long precedent in Northern California art, Eilertsen said, and the show includes works “from deep in di Rosa’s vault that demonstrate the maximalist strain running through the di Rosa collection; joyful maximalism was a north star for Rene di Rosa.”

“Ghost in the Machine” shows works by Bay Area artists working in the shadow of Silicon Valley at the close of the 20th century, “artist-tinkerers like Alan Rath, Bruce Cannon, and Theresa Lahaie (who) anticipated today’s developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” she said.

The show introduces “a new side of the di Rosa collection,” added Twyla Ruby, di Rosa’s curatorial associate. “The collection is chock full of works engaged with the wonder and horror of late-capitalist technology. Visitors will encounter machines that seem to blink, breathe and pulse with life, blurring the line between human and machine.”

“They were ahead of the game,” Eilertsen said.

Looking around at the new shows going up and the rescued art going into a safe place to wait for its own show, Eilertsen concluded, “Rene is very happy.”