Di Rosa Center opens satellite museum in San Francisco with a celebration of Northern California artists.

Artist Michele Pred first went up to di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa in 1988.

Then a student at California College of the Arts, she was immediately enamored. Seeing work like Mildred Howard’s bottle houses and Enrique Chagoya’s political art made a huge difference to her, she says. So, she kept going back—both to see the art and to spend time with vintner and Northern California art collector Rene di Rosa.

About a decade before di Rosa’s death in 2010, right after September 11th, Pred began collecting confiscated items at the San Francisco airport and made a piece called Stack out of the thousands of items she found. To her great delight, di Rosa acquired it.

Now that piece is on display in Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection—the debut exhibition on view through October 4th at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art’s new satellite museum, di Rosa San Francisco—which opened at the Minnesota Street Project last weekend.

The di Rosa San Francisco opened at the Minnesota Street Project last weekend.(Courtesy of @dirosaart)

The exhibition has three sections: Material Worlds; Piracy and Protest; and Tricksters, Scavengers, and Scamps. Each is meant to show how Northern Californian artists often work against the mainstream to experiment and push their art, and includes work by Roy De Forest, Ester Hernandez, Joan Brown, and Chagoya.

Chagoya met di Rosa when he was director of the Galería de la Raza in the late ‘80s. He eventually bought some of Chagoya’s work, including When Paradise Arrived, which uses imagery from Walt Disney, and is in the Far Out exhibition.

Chagoya has nothing but great things to say about Rene di Rosa and his focus on Northern California art, particularly art from the Bay Area. Important civil rights movements like the Black Panthers started here, Chagoya says, and he shares di Rosa’s love for the area. When he studied political economy in Mexico, Chagoya found it restrictive—the opposite of his experience in San Francisco.

“You had to be very precise, very concise, and if you said something wrong, you would be in trouble,” he says. “Then I went to study to the San Francisco Art Institute, and there was such freedom to do anything you wanted. Nobody would give you a hard time. And I felt like a wild horse in the open, grassy fields.”

Enrique Chagoya's 'When Paradise Arrived, ' 1988 (Courtesy di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art)

Chagoya says di Rosa embodied that spirit of freedom for him. He’s glad to see the gallery opening in San Francisco, where he hopes more people can see the collection.

Conceptual artist Paul Kos’ Equilibre III—made of a broom, two bells, and a coat hanger—is in Far Out, too. Like Chagoya and Pred, he thinks di Rosa San Francisco (in what he calls a “big, beautiful space” created by Minnesota Street Project founders Andy and Deborah Rappaport) means more people will have access to the art.

Kos has a deep connection with di Rosa—both the man and the museum. His video, Chartres Bleu, which recreates the passage of light through a stained-glass window from Chartres Cathedral, shows at the Napa di Rosa’s underground Tunnel/Chapel, which Kos and artist Isabelle Sorrell collaborated on. He and Sorrell were married in the chapel, with di Rosa as the best man.

Kos, who got both his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute before going on to teach there for three decades, says di Rosa was committed to buying art exclusively from Northern California, feeling that New York was already getting plenty of attention.

“He would even come to the Art Institute and go up to a student and say, ‘Will you sell it?’” Kos says. “They would think he wasn’t serious, and he would say, ‘I'll give you $200 for this painting,’ when it was still wet.’”

Visitors at the opening of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art's new satellite museum, di Rosa San Francisco.(Courtesy of @dirosaart)

In addition to opening the satellite museum in SF, the di Rosa Center in Napa will also be making some changes. Executive director Kate Eilertsen—who co-curated Far Out with Twyla Ruby—says the cost of running the facilities there has grown beyond the museum’s income, requiring them to permanently rent out some of its spaces.

“We are keeping our large gallery here open, and we shortened our hours, but we're still keeping the whole property open,” she explains. “What we're doing is fixing the place up, and we are hoping that we will become a special place to have your event, your wedding, your corporate retreat. We are depending on it to have a constant stream of earned income. Art communities all over the country are suffering right now, and we need to not depend so much on donations and individuals supporting us.”

For the first San Francisco exhibition, they wanted to showcase the strengths of the permanent collection, showing historical works alongside contemporary ones to show the Northern California ethos.

“We think a lot about the material conditions underlying the possibilities of artistic careers in Northern California versus New York in the 20th century,” says Ruby. “There was less of a commercial art market infrastructure in Northern California, so there was less commercial motivation in art-making. There was more room for artists here to do things that were kind of bumpy and ugly and weird and kind of tongue-in-cheek and intentionally interrogating and challenging the norms and mores of mainstream art worlds in New York and Los Angeles.”