Bringing the Far Out Back in: At the Opening of di Rosa San Francisco
“Where’s the new di Rosa?” I asked at the Minnesota Street Project (MSP) atrium.
“It’s in the Old McEvoy space,” answered Segfred, MSP’s Galleries Supervisor and Events Coordinator, with a smile that’s warmly greeted me for almost a decade. His steady hand pointed down the street and across the road.
Opening in 2017 and the largest organization in the warren of studios, non-profits, and galleries of MSP, the McEvoy Family Foundation for the Arts anchored the community there. They were dedicated to not only sharing their collection with the public, but also creating a rare example of how philanthropists might truly contribute to the art ecology of the Bay.
But then in 2023, it vanished.
The McEvoy closure left a psychological gap in the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem. One name off the wall, one family stepping back, and the whole balance shifted. Two years later, di Rosa steps into that gap.
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The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is a story about one couple who, without astronomical wealth, managed to reshape the cultural history of Northern California. With an insatiable thirst for provocation, beauty, and radical expression, the vinyardists and later collectors René and Veronica di Rosa quenched this passion with art. Their strategy was simple: collect local, follow instinct, and let passion lead the way. Out of that unruly devotion grew one of the most vital private collections of postwar Northern California art, and with it, a legacy that continues to ripple across the Bay even after their passing.
Before founding the center, René di Rosa (b. Boston 1919) was a pioneering Carneros vineyardist. After Yale, service in WWII, a stint in Paris, and another as a reporter at the SF Chronicle, di Rosa bought about 460 acres in the Carneros region of Napa in 1960 after receiving a small inheritance. He studied viticulture at UC Davis, and subsequently planted Pinot Noir and Chardonnay; by the 1970s he was farming roughly 250 acres and selling grapes to 53 wineries, helping prove Carneros as a cool-climate powerhouse. With the marriage of artist-author Veronica McDonald in the mid-1970s, together the di Rosas made Winery Lake part vineyard, part salon. In 1986 he sold 176 to 250 acres to Seagram for about $8–10 million (around $45,000 per acre, a benchmark at the time) and poured the windfall into what became the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, keeping the remaining land as a wild art-and-nature preserve. After Veronica’s death in 1991, he devotedly deepened the collection, treating it as his lifeline.
The di Rosa Preserve finally opened to the public in 1997: two large galleries, a lake, trails overlooking vineyards, outdoor sculpture garden, and picnic grounds. Over 217 acres, protected in perpetuity under the Napa County Land Trust.
“'Just because my name is di Rosa doesn't mean I like roses,” said René di Rosa to the New York Times in 1997. “I actually like the thorns, and some of the art you'll see here is thorny, so I hope it needles you and tickles you.''
René never cloaked art in authority. A self-described “artaholic,” he didn’t hold a soft spot for any particular medium “what matters to me is what it’s made into…. Chewing gum, crab claws, hair, bones, bowling balls, feathers, marbles, brooms, boots and shoes, shirts. Pretty much anything-anything that smacks of life. Paint is nice, too” he told Richard Reiseman, di Rosa Preserve curator in an interview in the Collection’s 1999 catalogue Local Color.
“Talking about art,” he joked, “is like trying to French kiss over the telephone.” He rooted himself unapologetically in this place and its artists. “Provincial to the core,” he’d say. That mix: humor, stubborn love of region, and a taste for the thorny, feels just right for San Francisco right now.
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Back at the opening of the Incorrect Museum (René’s nickname for the collection that was adopted as the name of di Rosa’s new San Francisco outpost), octogenerian artist and filmmaker Mike Henderson and his band, Cabin Fever, were tuning the front of MSP’s annex into a funky, bluesy hum. A groovy nostalgia drifted through the parking lot like a vineyard breeze.
With the red ribbon cut, the large crowd gleefully poured into Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection. The very first conversation I had was with a woman who described herself simply as “just an art lover.” I replied, “Fantastic, thank you! We need more of you in this city.” She looked puzzled and said, “What do you mean? Everybody I know is a diehard art lover.” Looking around, that statement was obviously true for that room. People were actually really truly looking at the art: noses just a bit too close to the canvases, then stepping back to take it in at a distance, friends talking animatedly, pointing, gesturing, circling back. It looked like muscle memory, not a performance.
There was a lot of affection in the air for di Rosa. In several conversations, people expressed how thrilled they are to have the foundation open the Incorrect Museum here in San Francisco.
In a totally energizing conversation with Twyla Ruby, the di Rosa’s lead curator, she explained that this inaugural show is designed as a broad-spectrum introduction to the collection, but future exhibitions will be more focused, exploring deeper discourses, tensions, and idiosyncrasies of individual artists or themes in the collection.
Ruby spoke passionately about creating educational and archival resources around the under-documented period of Northern California art that the collection focuses on. When I asked about what kind of impact she hopes the di Rosa would make 10 years from now, Ruby’s prophesy was “I hope that a younger generation of artists will engage with the art history that is represented by the collection to a greater degree than they are doing now. I hope that collectors and institutions will be acquiring a greater degree of art from this region as a result of some of the programming and exhibitions that we're doing.”
The next exhibition will be a retrospective of the pioneering conceptual ceramicist Jim Melchert. He taught and worked closely with Peter Voulkos at the UC Berkeley’s Ceramic Pot Shop, and then later on went on to become a Director of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s. “He had a really important mentorship relationship with many contemporary artists here, so he's kind of like a godfather of the contemporary art scene in the region” shared Twylia Ruby.
Walking through the exhibition, Joan Brown’s lush portrait Girl Standing (Girl With Red Nose) from 1962 really caught my attention. Here I can see the wet push-and-pull of Abstract Expressionism (via Hans Hoffman) that had defined Bay Area painting in the decade before, with Brown edging toward the frank, feminist, and playfully idiosyncratic painting she later became famous for. Looking back it’s easy to spot the grand historical shifts of a place through the work of its artists, and hard not to wonder where we are in the Bay now (Bay Area Now is harder and more fraught to spot perhaps than Bay Area Then). Though honestly, I was fighting off a wicked headache, just enough energy to dive into a few pieces and ask witty enough questions for people to want to engage.
Soaking in the aesthetic of the di Rosa collection, I easily appreciate the revolutionary spirit of those artists from that era. It makes me wonder what I can learn from the elders as an artist myself.
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I mosied over to the main MSP campus, which pulsed with humans of a different generation. I’m glad the old guard has created an outpost for archiving and formally documenting that history. For me, the story of the di Rosas and their newest satellite in San Francisco is an example of how two people with purpose and dedication to this place, our place, can change art history.
Here’s the part I don’t want to undersell: Veronica and René di Rosa did not have a tech IPO’s war chest. What they had was passion, humor and stubborn loyalty to this region, they turned this into one of the great repositories of postwar Northern California art. Their blissful allergy to pomp changed the texture of our cultural memory.
All of this made me wonder how the Bay might support both the preservation of past generations’ disruptions and the urgencies of our contemporary zeitgeist. The question is not whether we preserve our history or fund our contemporary voices, but whether we can do both at once. The risk, if we don’t, is that our region’s story narrows to a footnote in tech’s saga. The opportunity, if we do, is a Bay Area Renaissance: resourced, revolutionary, intergenerational, stunningly cutting edge and perhaps even stubbornly local.