After an hour, two u-turns, and 50 miles in a borrowed truck, I arrived at di Rosa, former home of the late and prolific collectors Veronica and Rene di Rosa. This Napa Valley property was and is more than just a home. Spanning over 200 acres, it includes a Main Gallery, a Gatehouse Gallery, the ‘historic’ home of the di Rosas, a Paul Kos chapel, a sculpture courtyard, a sculpture meadow, and an average of 40 territorial peacocks at any given time.
The di Rosa collection includes approximately 2,000 works of art by more than 800 artists, all with ties to Northern California, spanning the 1950s to the 2000s. The wall labels read like a who’s who in the history of Northern California art, including everyone from David Park and Joan Brown to Larry Sultan and Stephanie Syjuco. The di Rosas knew no material limits. They were attracted to, and gleefully collected, everything from video work to large-scale outdoor sculpture. Their actual house, apparently left as they lived in it, is so full of art (sculptures in the bathroom, fabric works on the beds, giant paintings hanging on the angled A-frame ceiling) visitors get a sense of the couples’ compulsion, their generosity, and both the good and bad in the past 60 years of our region’s art output.
While most of di Rosa is unchanging, the Gatehouse Gallery features shifting, curated exhibitions of contemporary art. Though separate from the di Rosa collection, the exhibitions are situated within the context of that collection, crowded in at the edges by an overflow of William T. Wiley paintings and David Best art cars.
For the current exhibition, Bay Area-based curator Renny Pritikin organized External Combustion: Four Sacramento Sculptors, a show of the four mid-career Sacramento sculptors Nathan Cordero, Julia Couzens, Chris Daubert, and Dave Lane. Their works are visually disparate, but tied together, as per the curatorial statement, by “a rough kind of beauty” and “use of modest, found, or industrial materials.”
While I found the work visually unappealing in many respects (with a few exceptions I’ll note later), one of the main goals of the show — to expose a regional art economy to a wider Bay Area audience — was definitely accomplished. I arrived at di Rosa with no knowledge of the artwork being produced in Sacramento and left with four names in my roster. I must admit the show’s conceit primed me to be skeptical about the quality of the work. If I can fault an art scene for being regional (and I’m not sure how this is really a pejorative), I can fault my adopted hometown for being exclusive, homogenous, and commercially driven. Admitting to my own prejudices and expectations, here goes: