Fine art, ‘Sinners’, and Black Wine Fest coming to the Napa Library for Black History Month
Four days a week, Nicole Thomas is at the American Canyon Library helping people from all over the county learn to read. Every year around February, she has a second job: coordinating the packed bill of events for Black History Month at Napa County libraries.
Thomas has put together an immersive program for the month. Events coming up include a fine art exhibit and talk, two screenings of Oakland native Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a specialty tea time with Leo Hickman and the city’s second Black Wine Fest.
Thomas said, “We wanted to include people who are local artists, local writers, local movie makers.” With Black winemakers, she added, “it’s one of those things you really have to research and dig it out on your own to find it.”
Black history in Napa is as old as Napa is, detailed beautifully by local historian Alexandria Brown in her work “Hidden History of Napa Valley.” 2.4% of Napa County residents are Black, just over 31,000 people, a number that’s grown over time.
Social media has been a boon to Black winemakers and winery owners, Thomas said, “your business being shared around.” She sees the impact of this when strolling around the city. “When I walk downtown, I see Black people — Black women, Black men — going into Brown [Estates] to their tasting room.”
With February’s programming, Thomas emphasises the present possibilities of the growing Black presence in Napa as much as she champions Black history.
Jermaine Burse paints to awaken the soul
American Canyon-raised artist Jermaine Burse kicks things off today with an exhibit of paintings in the Napa County Library’s Community Meeting Room, starting at 9 a.m.
For the second year in a row, Burse’s portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., adorned hundreds of shirts and posters for San Francisco’s Museum of African Diaspora’s free community day on Jan. 19, Dr. King’s birthday.
He’s sought after for commissions by a range of big names: Moët Hennessey, Steph Curry and Robert DeNiro, for starters. And Burse still finds time to be assistant coach for his son’s basketball team at American Canyon High School.
“I’m excited about it,” said Burse of Thursday’s exhibit. “I get a chance to showcase pieces that really explore Black excellence, to showcase the icons that we grew up looking at — James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, MLK, Harriet Tubman — they were like living legends to us in our homes.
“These are the people that fought for freedom and justice for us in a world that denies us that.”
Burse typically does portraits, painting full-time out of his studio in Cordelia. Like the icons he paints, he has a seemingly endless list of endeavors, from writing to arranging spots on podcasts and raising a teenage son.
In November, Burse published a book about his struggles with addiction, titled “An Autopsy of My Former Self: A journey through grief, transformation, addiction, personal triumph, and purpose.” At 6 p.m. this evening, there will be a reception and a Q&A with Burse, and wine poured by Justin Michelle Trabue of Ward Four Wines.
After hours at the library
To close out Black History Month, Shanika Rucker-Brumfeld of Bruc Family Wines will join a number of other vintners — all Black women — to showcase their wines at the library’s after hours Black Wine Fest on Friday, Feb. 27. For Rucker-Brumfeld, a bonus of the night is its potential to help out small businesses.
“Napa already has a reputation for the best wine in the country,” she said. “This way, smaller brands will get in front of larger crowds. It’s a great opportunity, especially for minority producers.”
Rucker-Brumfeld was part of last year’s Black Wine Fest too — the first in Napa County. The event drew more than 200 people to the library, and this year promises to be even bigger, she said.
Rucker-Brumfeld lives in Fairfield, which she called a “budding community of winemakers.” But her base is Napa, where she makes wine through a local custom crush lab.
For her wines, she travels around the state, sourcing grapes from the Coachella Valley to Mendocino County. While she hopes to one day have a tasting room, “Not having a winery is a beautiful thing,” said Rucker-Brumfeld, who also holds down a full time job. “I can’t be out there tending grapes every day.”
Most of Bruc Family Wine’s business happens online and at private events. In some ways, her business model is insulated from the crisis hitting winemakers in the region.
“People are drinking wine,” she said, noting new wine bars in San Francisco and other cities. “But they’re not spending $225 on a cab sauv anymore.”
Rucker-Brumfeld got into wine right at the source: In Naples, Italy, while stationed at a U.S. Naval base. She spent a lot of her down time exploring the wine scene. “I was too young to be asking the right questions — I was just loving the wine,” she laughed.
After Italy, Rucker-Brumfeld and her husband moved to Vallejo, his hometown. Being in wine country deepened her taste for the grape, and she started pouring for J. Moss, a popular Black-owned winery. J. Moss is still her favorite wine, second only to the red blend she concocted called Full Bloom: 67% cabernet franc, plus cabernet sauvignon, malbec and merlot.
Screenings and a poster exhibit
Art, wine, and, of course, film: 16-Academy Award nominee “Sinners” will be screened at the American Canyon Library on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at 5:30 p.m. and again at the Napa County Library on Feb. 18. Both screenings are free.
Thomas said “Sinners” wasn’t that easy to watch locally when it came out last year. “It was only in Napa for a short time, and not at all the movie theaters,” she said.
“People say, ‘Oh, is this just a horror film?’ It’s like — to who? For Black people? Of course it is. Because we live this stuff every day.”
Coogler grew up in Oakland, sealing his position in Hollywood with the massively successful “Fruitvale Station” and “Black Panther” films and now “Sinners.”
On Tuesday, Feb. 24, the American Canyon Library’s Community Room will be the site of an art show of its own: A walk-through poster exhibit from the archives of the Smithsonian Magazine highlighting the 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign.
“Every BIPOC group you can think of in the country came together,” said Thomas of the Poor People’s Campaign. “They set up this kind of city right on the National Mall where they protested, wanting the government to see that this is that people around the country are struggling.
“With the exhibit, you can walk through and kind of get an idea of what the country was looking like, and how people were coming together, and how people came from the west, the south, the north, from everywhere — all converged onto this place at the National Mall.”
As a staffer in the Adult Literacy Center, Thomas and her countywide cohort are busy. “We help people who are second-language learners who need to learn English to better their lives, to help their kids with homework, to get better jobs.”
She starts planning Black History Month as far out as August. For Thomas, it’s worth it. “It’s a lot of work,” she said. “But I do love it.”
There are ways to engage in Black History Month all around Napa. The annual Napa Valley Black History Month Celebration takes place this Saturday, Feb. 7, at Crosswalk Church, with speakers and dinner from Buster’s Original Southern BBQ.
Napa Valley College events center around Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black Oakland native killed by a BART officer on New Year’s Day in 2009. On Tuesday, the college showed “Fruitvale Station,” a film directed by Ryan Coogler about Grant’s life and killing. A conversation with Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson, is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 11, at 11 a.m. in the NVC Performing Arts Center.
