Eat, Drink, and Be Cultural

If the notion of establishing a single cultural center for wine, food and the arts sounds like a recipe for goulash, take a look at your favorite art history book. Eating, drinking and art-making have simmered in the same pot through the ages. Beginning with prehistoric cave drawings of bison hunts, examples include everything from Roman paintings of Dionysian festivals to 17th century Dutch still-lifes and Andy Warhol’s Pop paintings of Campbell’s soup cans.

Still, the launching of Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts has raised some eyebrows in the art world. Initiated by wine industry pioneer Robert Mondavi, who acquired a 121/2-acre site for the project in downtown Napa and made a lead gift of $20 million, the unusual institution opened last Sunday. It occupies a $55-million, 80,000-square-foot building designed by Polshek Partnership Architects.

The two-story structure of stone, polished concrete, metal and glass has 13,000 square feet of gallery space, to be used for an exhibition program. But that’s only one component of the new institution, which will offer wine tasting and gourmet dining along with a variety of public programs in its demonstration kitchen, classrooms, gardens, and indoor and outdoor theaters.

Named for the Roman goddess of abundance, Copia is advertised as “the world’s leading cultural center dedicated to the discovery, understanding and celebration of wine, food and the arts.” But it didn’t initially inspire the confidence of hard-core arts professionals--including its director, Peggy A. Loar. “My first reaction was, ‘They can’t be serious about the arts,”’ she said in an interview in her office overlooking the Napa River. “I thought they just added that onto the title.”

An art historian with 30 years of experience in museum management, Loar was in her 10th year as founding president and director of the Wolfsonian Museum and Research Center, a trove of advertising and propaganda art, when she got the call from Copia in 1997. Getting the Wolfsonian off the ground, both in Miami and in Genoa, Italy, required her to organize an eclectic, 70,000-piece collection of American and European design and decorative arts, and to create displays that show how art is used to sell ideas and products.

“It was an intellectual challenge,” she said. And she decided it was time to take on a new one.

“I realized that wherever you have the arts, good food and wine generally follow,” Loar said. “People who enjoy food and wine, or are involved in the production or spiritual and nourishing aspects of it, will also be intrigued by the history of art [that relates to it] and by contemporary artists who are looking at social issues as a way to define their lives and experience. I began to think of wine and food as agri-culture and art as material culture.”

Loar also began to think of Copia as “a kind of conceptual museum, one that would not be burdened with the tremendous responsibility and cost of maintaining a collection,” she said. “We could work with museums that have collections in a way that cross-pollinates with the humanities, so that we could deal with issues like cultural anthropology and archeology and contemporary art history and conceptual art.

“We could also look to the future and bring together artists, humanists and scientists to talk about issues like global food supply and sustainable agriculture. We are not just interested in abundance here, but also scarcity,” she said.

Four and a half years after Loar began pondering all this, Copia has opened with three inaugural exhibitions. “Active Ingredients”--the main event for the art crowd--is composed of specially commissioned food-related works by seven contemporary artists. In addition, “Forks in the Road: Food, Wine and the American Table” examines the evolution of American tastes and customs, while “A Fine Glass of Wine” presents 105 rare wine glasses from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

With Betty Teller, assistant director of exhibitions, Loar hopes to present “one splendid, important, major contemporary show” each year, along with many other exhibitions in the galleries and gardens. “Active Ingredients” was organized by guest curators Margaret Miller, director of the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, and Amy Cappellazzo, former curator of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and newly appointed international specialist at Christie’s contemporary art department in New York.

“We each contributed a list of artists who connect food and art, but the theme grew out of the artists’ practice,” Miller said. “We wanted a theme involving food production and consumption that would move through the show. We also wanted artists who work in a very interactive way. That was important because many people who come to this center won’t expect to see this kind of art exhibition, and some of them may get their first introduction to contemporary art here. We hope the work will engage them with the ideas the artists deal with.”

The curators came up with a roster of six artists and one partnership, Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth of Houston, who call themselves the Art Guys. The two Texas artists have created several works for the show, including a wall piece of silverware, a tower of food tins, and wearable suits of plastic grapes. The Art Guys’ contribution to “Active Ingredients” is open to interpretation, but it all “relates to food, consumption and pop culture, in the context of Napa,” Miller said.

Lee Mingwei, a Taiwanese American artist who lives in New York, is doing a new version of his “Dining Project,” a series of performances and installations about the ritual of dining. “In this case, a video camera records encounters between guests and a server, which are projected on a platform between the meals,” Miller said. Visitors who want to participate in future performances are invited to put their names in a box, she said.

Andrea Zittel, who lives in Joshua Tree and bases her art on everyday activities, used “Active Ingredients” as an opportunity to design and build herself a high-efficiency kitchen unit, which is temporarily lodged at the gallery. Washing dishes is not her favorite thing, so she sculpted a birch tabletop with built-in plates that can be wiped off after meals.

The other works are also likely to surprise visitors whose experience of art is limited to traditional painting and sculpture. Gay Outlaw, a former pastry chef who lives in San Francisco, made a vineyard-like field of candy, composed of 37 cast slabs of caramel that sit on metal springs and are expected to deteriorate during the course of the exhibition. Antoni Miralda, a Spanish artist based in Miami, filled 11 refrigerated soda cases with found objects as part of his continuing project “Food Culture Museum.” Grouped according to themes, the collection of kitsch and bric-a-brac presents everything from a giant red plastic light-up tongue and a batch of chamber pots to statuary portraying eating and drinking rituals in various cultures.

The show also features a work in progress by Lucy Orta, a British artist who lives in Paris. “It’s about the idea of gleaning,” Orta said, “picking up food that’s left over and would be destroyed, and finding ways of recuperating it and transforming it.” She developed her interest in Paris by collecting leftover produce in open-air markets and joining a community that distributes surplus, she said.

At Copia, there’s a long table set with porcelain plates designed by Orta and manufactured at the Royal Limoges factory in Limoges, France. The table will be the site of a benefit meal, to be prepared with surplus food from local fields and markets. Those who buy a ticket to the dinner, which hasn’t been scheduled yet, will get one of the plates as a souvenir. The proceeds will go to a local nonprofit association that feeds people in need.

Also on view is a trailer that Orta made. Equipped with an expandable picnic table and chairs, it can be hitched onto a car and taken into the countryside for impromptu community meals. “It’s a work of art, but it’s also functional,” she said. “I like the play between the poetic and the functional.”

The final artist, L.A.’s Jorge Pardo--who became known as a sculptor but has moved on to architectural work--opted out of the gallery and into Copia’s working kitchen. At his request, Pardo was commissioned to design a tile floor as a permanent fixture. The result is a striped design in off-white and graduated blues and greens.

“I didn’t want to be in another group show where the work gets shuffled around,” Pardo said. What’s more, he questioned the commitment to art of a cultural center essentially built with wine money. “I wanted to make sure they got stuck with my work,” he said.

“The kitchen workers may not know that they are in a tile field created by an artist,” Miller said. As for visitors, they won’t even see Pardo’s floor unless they catch a glimpse of it through a window or are invited to a special meal in the kitchen. Documentary photos of the project will be on view in the lobby, however.

Art isn’t exactly new to Napa Valley. Several wineries have erected signature buildings or assembled art collections to entice visitors to their business. But Loar contends that Copia was established to do something different.

“The overarching fact is that we are connecting all of these things up--wine, food and the arts,” she said. “I like to think of us as a museum of ideas because we are trying to bring together the foodies, the wine people and the art people. They are connected but at the same time disparate, just like the rest of society.”

The exhibition program is intended to appeal to a broad audience while providing a showcase for artists who work with food and related issues. Next spring, Copia will present “The Artful Teapot: Twentieth-Century Expressions from the Kamm Collection,” which features 250 inventive variations on a traditional form (May 16-Sept. 2), and “The Birth of Coffee,” a show of photographs and writings by Daniel Lorenzetti and Linda Rice, who have documented coffee culture worldwide (May 16-Aug. 12). Future exhibitions include “Return Engagement: Art From Recycled Materials” (Aug. 22-Jan. 1, 2003) and “Sweet Tooth,” a show of edible works by 25 artists (Jan. 30-May 12, 2003).

At its heart, Copia “gets to a kind of sensibility about life, how we look at our past, our future and, better than that, how we live in the present,” Loar said. “The real challenge when I arrived here was to articulate the mission and make sure it was important enough to raise millions of dollars. I wasn’t interested in a project that was about the good life. I really care about all the issues that surround the fact that some people have good food to eat and some people don’t.” *

“Active Ingredients,” Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, 500 1st St., Napa. Ends April 22. Thursdays-Mondays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Adults, $12.50; students and seniors, $10; children 6-12, $7.50. (707) 259-1600.