{"id":150869,"date":"2025-11-24T20:55:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/150869\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T20:55:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T20:55:10","slug":"antica-terra-winemaker-maggie-harrison-works-with-artists-for-box-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/150869\/","title":{"rendered":"Antica Terra Winemaker Maggie Harrison Works With Artists for Box Set"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEditor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story is part of\u00a0Newsmakers<\/a>, an ARTnews\u00a0series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaggie Harrison is the head of winemaking at Antica Terra in Oregon\u2019s Willamette Valley, where she has garnered a reputation as one of the most celebrated practitioners of the craft. With a group of artists\u2014Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin\u2014she recently unveiled a limited-edition box set<\/a> of wines blended as part of a collaborative process that also included the creation of individual artworks packaged along with the bottles, in a self-described \u201cMuseum in a Box.\u201d <\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tProceeds from the 150 sets will go to Denniston Hill, the artist residency program founded by Mehretu and Pfeiffer (along with Lawrene Chua) in the Catskill Mountains in upstate in New York.<\/p>\n

\n\tHarrison also opened a dedicated Art Meadow this past summer at Antica Terra, which played home to a site-specific installation by Los Angeles\u2013based artist Lily Clark. She plans to continue with another exhibition to open next year.<\/p>\n

\n\tARTnews spoke to Harrison about her engagement with artists in the midst of working as an artist herself.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did the idea of making wine with artists come about?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe have been allowing people who are not winemakers\u2014a musician or a private client or a poet or a bonsai master\u2014to join us in our making so that we could gain greater intimacy. We understand and feel our work in a way that is so profound to us, but there is a barrier to understanding because we can\u2019t explain exactly what it feels like and how we do what we do. Until somebody can do it, they just couldn\u2019t fully understand. So we started sharing the work with people who work in a different ways, who call out the shape of what they want to see in their work and find forms they already know they want in advance.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen, in 2023, Alex Halberstadt very lovingly and generously wrote an article<\/a> about me and my work in the New York Times Magazine. The day that it published, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who owns the galleries Salon 94 and Salon 94 Design, sent me an email and said, \u201cHey, I like the way you think. We should do something together.\u201d So I went to Salon 94 and Jeannie said, \u201cTell me: what are the cool things that you want to do?\u201d I felt like a seventh-grader on a first date; there was just this outpouring of every creative idea that we have been dreaming of. I shared with her the idea of seeing things from different perspectives and treating wine as a material in the same way that you would clay or stone or paint. She said, \u201cThere was a time in artistic creation where people got to live outside their boundaries more often. Artists got to create sets for ballets. They got to cook dinner together. They got to do all of these things. But the current state of what is expected of artists is so boundaried.\u201d She said if I had an idea that would allow us to create space for disciplines to act outside their boundaries together, she would love to be a part of it.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tFour wines created by Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin, along with Maggie Harrison.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Antica Terra<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did that lead to working with Julie Mehretu?<\/p>\n

\n\tJeanne is connected to everyone and acts with such largesse. We started brainstorming artists who might want to make wine with me and she said, \u201cDo you know Julie Mehretu?\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m obsessed with her work.\u201d I also said that if we were going to do this, I didn\u2019t want to make money. I didn\u2019t want it to be in service of my business, because that would break the covenant of what we were promising each other. I said it could be an opportunity to work with philanthropy or a charity that could benefit, and that\u2019s when Jeanne told me about what Julie does with Denniston Hill.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did Julie Mehretu respond when you first floated the idea to her?<\/p>\n

\n\tShe used a word that I avoid using in my own work, and it\u2019s been really instructive for me. She said, \u201cWhat an incredible opportunity to welcome play.\u201d When people talk that way about our winemaking, I bristle every time. People say, \u201cAre you playing with amphora? Are you playing with other varieties?\u201d I have to stop them and say that winemaking is not play for me. It\u2019s my life\u2019s work and my livelihood. It doesn\u2019t feel like play to me at all. But it is acting on curiosity and experimentation all the time, so it was interesting to hear Julie use the word play many times in our conversations. So much of her work is rooted in experimentation and following her curiosity and ideas, but then also allowing a spirit of enlivened play to enter into the process. This project felt like an unfurling or an expansion of that.<\/p>\n

\n\tJulie said yes and then I told her she could choose the other people to be at the table with her. She chose Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin. What was so fascinating when we all went to Julie\u2019s house in Harlem was that none of them showed palms\u2014none of them said, \u201cI\u2019m not a winemaker. I couldn\u2019t possibly know what I\u2019m doing here.\u201d They all leaned into the work with such abandon. The way they looked at it was: this is a material, and I know how to work with materials. They all worked very differently with it, but there was no friction and no fear. They were all like: I know how to work, and this is a medium with which I get to work today. Their spirit of leaning-in was so generous and cool to see.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn artwork by Julie Mehretu for the box set.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Antica Terra<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did the winemaking process work?<\/p>\n

\n\tWe took samples from five different barrels of pinot noir from our cellar, from the 2022 vintage, and brought them as blending kits to the artists. We sat at Julie\u2019s kitchen table, and each of the artists had a graduated cylinder, a serological pipette, and their own set of bottles. First, they went about tasting and wrote notes in their notebook about how they felt about each of the samples. Then each of them, independently, made their own wine out of the same five ingredients. All the wines are completely disparate. There was no discernible pattern. Each of them made a very distinct blend that is completely different from the artist next to them. They all saw all the wines differently.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey also got to share in this very expansive, creative conversation about what they were seeing, how they felt about it, what they were going for, what they thought was desirable. They talked about what complexity felt like, what structure is like, how to describe structure in a very different medium. They had a collaborative conversation, even though each of them made their own wines.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut both Antica Terra and Denniston Hill are about stewardship and regenerative acts. They didn\u2019t use all the wines, because they didn\u2019t have to. At the end of the day, once they had all made their cuvees, there were little scraps of everything left over. So Mimi Adams, who is co-winemaker at Antica Terra, and I went back to the table with all the scraps as well as their full composites, and we put them in a separate blind blending session. And then Mimi and I made a fourth wine together, taking in their work and what was left behind.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tArtworks by Paul Pfeiffer for the box set.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Antica Terra<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you arrive upon the idea of making the wines available by way of a box set?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe project is called \u201cSwerve,\u201d in service of the idea that we are always moving from what was an original idea toward points of attraction, that we are moving toward one another, toward places, toward each other\u2019s work, and that nothing exists in creative autonomy. Nobody exists in a vacuum, and no matter how original the work, it is referencing eons of history of creative work that came before it and is also inspiring creative work that comes after. In the box there is one bottle of each of the artists\u2019 wines. Then each of them created an original piece of artwork that\u2019s been produced in an edition of 150. Julie created a dry-point etching. Paul created two lenticulars. And then Jessica created an artwork that was based on a rubbing of a beaver-affected log from Denniston Hill.<\/p>\n

\n\tI was really interested in the artwork being separate from the bottle itself, so that it didn\u2019t live in somebody\u2019s cellar or closet or refrigerator. I liked the idea that the two things would live together but live different lives. Everyone who buys the box set gets the three original artworks. Then there is a written piece. The theme is \u201cExquisite Corpse,\u201d and there is an essay, an interview, a poem, and a joke. Then, additionally, [a transcription of] a conversation that we all had that stemmed from questions I sent to try to understand why they said yes to me and how it felt from their point of view. We weaved their answers into an actual narrative exquisite corpse.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAn artwork by Jessica Rankin for the box set.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Antica Terra<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving worked with bonsai masters, musicians, all other people of the kind you mentioned, is there anything particular about working with visual artists that was unique?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a small sample size so I can\u2019t say that I\u2019m getting a clear read on visual artists versus other people, but what I can say was so refreshing and surprising about working with these three in particular was that nobody talked about the results. Nobody talked about what they were going for, what they wanted it to be, whether they like their wines to be food-friendly or have a particular kind of acidity or salinity or minerality. It was all about process in a way that is always in our own work but I hadn\u2019t seen reflected back the same way.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis past summer you opened a dedicated Art Meadow at your winery. What led to that?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a history of wineries having art collections, and it makes for a really meaningful blending of disciplines and appreciation and connoisseurship. The thing that we understood when we were selected to be the next caretakers of our incredible piece of ground was that we have a responsibility to honor the place. We talk a lot about making space, but that assumes that there was some sort of tabula rasa that existed before, like we are creating space out of nothing. What we felt very keenly was this abundance. There was so much space that it afforded us the luxury to be able to say, \u201cWhat do we want to do? What is the distinction of this landscape and its gifts, and how do we share those gifts appropriately?\u201d A place is a living thing, and so you have to honor its ancestors, its history, its ghosts, its spirits, along with the living beings, as in plants and animals that are living on that place. So how do we honor all that and stay in conversation with this physical place in a way that\u2019s meaningful?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen we thought about what meaning felt like\u2014to be effective and thoughtful stewards of 188 acres of this corner of the country\u2014it was community-building and making sure that we weren\u2019t creating borders, that we were expanding boundaries and not creating lines, and really inviting people into this place. And we have been having conversations with artists in different disciplines for years. There have been all these creative tributaries to Antica Terra and the work that we do, and one of the things that was a recurring theme was if you work in environmental art, in installation, in large-format sculpture, there aren\u2019t so many homes for your work. There aren\u2019t many places for it to go, except for in storage. And there are only so many Storm Kings or Dia Beacons in the world.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo the reason we started thinking about creating an Art Meadow was as a way of community-building, as a way of honoring the place that existed before we got here. It felt like an honorable way to use it and make creative space in the world with what we have to share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story is part of\u00a0Newsmakers, an ARTnews\u00a0series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,40445],"class_list":{"0":"post-150869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-newsmakers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}