Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
Maggie Harrison is the head of winemaking at Antica Terra in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where she has garnered a reputation as one of the most celebrated practitioners of the craft. With a group of artists—Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin—she recently unveiled a limited-edition box set 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 “Museum in a Box.”
Proceeds 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.
Harrison also opened a dedicated Art Meadow this past summer at Antica Terra, which played home to a site-specific installation by Los Angeles–based artist Lily Clark. She plans to continue with another exhibition to open next year.
ARTnews spoke to Harrison about her engagement with artists in the midst of working as an artist herself.
How did the idea of making wine with artists come about?
We have been allowing people who are not winemakers—a musician or a private client or a poet or a bonsai master—to 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’t explain exactly what it feels like and how we do what we do. Until somebody can do it, they just couldn’t 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.
Then, in 2023, Alex Halberstadt very lovingly and generously wrote an article 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, “Hey, I like the way you think. We should do something together.” So I went to Salon 94 and Jeannie said, “Tell me: what are the cool things that you want to do?” 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, “There 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.” 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.
Four wines created by Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin, along with Maggie Harrison.
Courtesy Antica Terra
How did that lead to working with Julie Mehretu?
Jeanne is connected to everyone and acts with such largesse. We started brainstorming artists who might want to make wine with me and she said, “Do you know Julie Mehretu?” I said, “I’m obsessed with her work.” I also said that if we were going to do this, I didn’t want to make money. I didn’t 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’s when Jeanne told me about what Julie does with Denniston Hill.
How did Julie Mehretu respond when you first floated the idea to her?
She used a word that I avoid using in my own work, and it’s been really instructive for me. She said, “What an incredible opportunity to welcome play.” When people talk that way about our winemaking, I bristle every time. People say, “Are you playing with amphora? Are you playing with other varieties?” I have to stop them and say that winemaking is not play for me. It’s my life’s work and my livelihood. It doesn’t 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.
Julie 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’s house in Harlem was that none of them showed palms—none of them said, “I’m not a winemaker. I couldn’t possibly know what I’m doing here.” 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.
An artwork by Julie Mehretu for the box set.
Courtesy Antica Terra
How did the winemaking process work?
We 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’s 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.
They 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.
But both Antica Terra and Denniston Hill are about stewardship and regenerative acts. They didn’t use all the wines, because they didn’t 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.
Artworks by Paul Pfeiffer for the box set.
Courtesy Antica Terra
How did you arrive upon the idea of making the wines available by way of a box set?
The project is called “Swerve,” 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’s 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’ wines. Then each of them created an original piece of artwork that’s 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.
I was really interested in the artwork being separate from the bottle itself, so that it didn’t live in somebody’s 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 “Exquisite Corpse,” 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.
An artwork by Jessica Rankin for the box set.
Courtesy Antica Terra
Having 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?
It’s a small sample size so I can’t say that I’m 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’t seen reflected back the same way.
This past summer you opened a dedicated Art Meadow at your winery. What led to that?
There 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, “What do we want to do? What is the distinction of this landscape and its gifts, and how do we share those gifts appropriately?” 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’s meaningful?
When we thought about what meaning felt like—to be effective and thoughtful stewards of 188 acres of this corner of the country—it was community-building and making sure that we weren’t 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’t so many homes for your work. There aren’t many places for it to go, except for in storage. And there are only so many Storm Kings or Dia Beacons in the world.
So 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.
