Napa Lighted Art Festival set to return for its 8th year
Art fans, rejoice. The Napa Lighted Art Festival is returning to downtown Napa on Jan. 17 and will run for 30 days, ending on Feb. 15.
Sarah Winski, the public art coordinator for the city of Napa, said there will be 15 installations and three projection artworks at the festival this year. The projection art will only be up for the first nine nights.
As with prior years, there will be all-new works at the festival. The artwork will mostly be in the downtown area along the riverfront, up First Street, and at the festival’s projection sites, which are the First Presbyterian Church, the Courthouse, and Native Sons Hall. There will also be a large installation across the Oxbow District. The festival will feature artists from all over the world, including two Napa artists who are behind a new type of lighted art installation that will be displayed on the First Street Bridge.
“Public art in general is a really powerful economic force,” said Winski. “The origins of the festival were really to bring people both from Napa and from out of town, out and about into the city during the coldest, darkest, and wettest time of the year.”
She added, “Our team took inspiration from light festivals that were really popular across Europe and since we’ve started, a lot of cities in the U.S. have also started their own lighted art festivals, which we’re really excited about.
“Light itself is this very metaphorically rich concept, and it also is this emerging art form that’s really exciting,” Winski said. “It’s a lot of technology that’s involved…this year, in particular, we are exploring different forms of light.”
These include “a few different blacklight installations that are going to be really engaging,” she said.
Winski hopes visitors to the festival feel inspired by the artwork. “I think light in general is inspiring, it’s contemporary, and it’s uplifting,” she said. “I think it will bring everybody together.”
The festival is free and walkable, she noted. “We encourage everyone to come out and see the festival at least once, maybe twice…I hope that [visitors are] inspired by the technology, by the artwork, and [can] maybe imagine what kind of art they could create.”
One artist bringing her work to Napa is Dina Fisher, who focuses on outdoor installation art. She lives in the foothills of Los Angeles but visits the North Bay, and when she goes to the hot springs, she said she frequently stops by Napa restaurants.
“I love wild spaces, and Napa has its fair share,” Fisher said. “There are no streetlights here. We have mountain lions and coyotes and eagles and hawks.”
Fisher has been an artist for as long as she can remember. Coming from a highly creative family of artists, engineers, and people who build their own homes, by the age of 5, she wanted to be two things: an artist and an architect. Her interest in agriculture has helped her tremendously in her artwork, she said.
Her background is document photography, specifically environmental portraiture, which consisted of going into people’s neighborhoods, homes and vineyards and taking emotionally evocative photos of their lives.
As time went on, Fisher decided to focus more on graphic design. She was a commercial designer for decades, working for clients all over the country and across all media.
In 2017, Fisher created her first art installation for Burning Man, a “global cultural movement advancing a more creative, connected and thriving society,” according to its website. The next year, her much larger installation was light art where she read brain waves of people who were meditating and used the brainwave data to control projection art, lights and sounds inside a 13-foot-tall pyramid.
“After I did that piece, I realized I had basically done the work of a small startup business,” Fisher said. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, you know, I could do this professionally; no questions asked.’”
Fisher then began working as a fine artist. A piece she did last fall at the Getty Center was a temperature art installation in the front courtyard. It was about light and space and featured natural lighting with no nighttime lighting. As with many of her pieces, it centered around the notion of connectedness on a cosmic scale.
Along with festival art, Fisher also creates permanent installation art for municipalities and has works in Burbank, California, Denton, Texas, and Rockville, Maryland.
“I was looking around for different light art festivals that would be interested in my kind of work, and I came across Napa,” Fisher said. “I love that area. It’s a beautiful part of California. I am a California artist and, often, when I exhibit, it’s out of state, so I was really excited by the opportunity to do something based in California.”
Fisher’s artwork for the Napa festival is called “XOX” and will feature three nine-foot-tall letters arranged side by side. On the surface of the letters, there will be light-reactive mural art. She uses color theory, which means that parts of the artwork will disappear depending on what color of light she shines on the mural.
“When I’m alternating red, green, and blue light on the surface of the work, the work seems to come alive,” said Fisher. “It morphs and changes so some things come into vision, some things disappear, and it’s just an undulating experience of artwork blending in and out of different layers of itself.
“One of my favorite themes that I visit often is interconnection,” Fisher continued. “With this piece, there are many animal creatures: there are plants, there are humans in it, there are fantastical creatures that don’t really exist but are imaginative. They all fade in and out of one another, and it gives the sense of oneness or somehow that we all come from the same source, that we all have a connection with one another.
“It’s really that sense of interconnection to all life forms that I’m trying to impress upon people,” she said. “That’s why it’s all themed around love. We all share a common planet here on Earth: us, the plants, the animals…we all depend upon one another intrinsically…our very breath depends upon one another. The food we eat depends on plants…I love based interconnection.”
Fisher plans to attend the festival on its opening night. She will be at her artwork part of the time but will also be checking out other works.
Another participating artist is Emily Nicolosi, a lead artist for In Theory Art Studios, which she started with her husband in Huntsville, Utah.
Nicolosi, who lives in northern Utah, has visited Napa.
“[Napa] is a beautiful place,” she said. “We’re very honored to contribute to that space and that atmosphere.”
Nicolosi had an interest in painting from a young age and majored in studio art in college.
After college, she earned a PhD in geography with a focus on climate change mitigation and climate misinformation. During grad school, she started going to Burning Man. Inspired by the art at the festival, she has now gone to Burning Man for more than 10 years.
When Nicolosi’s mother passed away suddenly, she felt that she had to make a sculpture for her mother. She made a giant dichroic heart called “koroloco,” which will be displayed in Napa. The sculpture she made for her mother was her first large-scale sculpture.
Nicolosi didn’t want the sculpture to be put in storage and so she displayed it in downtown Salt Lake City, where she was living for the winter that year.
People began asking if they could rent the sculpture and if she had any other pieces of art. She and her husband, who had a separate job in biotech, started making more Burning Man-style art. Things snowballed from there. Now, they have around 12 temporary art pieces that they tour, as well as several permanent art pieces.
Nicolosi’s husband ended up quitting his biotech job. She still spends some of her time as a research assistant professor at the University of Utah, but mostly works on art.
Nicolosi said Napa organizers had reached out to her and her husband in the past to see if they might be interested in showing their artwork at the Lighted Art Festival. At the time, they were staging a show in Salt Lake every winter and had to decline. When they lost funding for the Utah show, it opened the door for the Napa opportunity.
Nicolosi will have three pieces at the Napa Lighted Art Festival, including “koro loco” as well as “miri” and “polychroma.” She describes “miri” as a big star that can change color depending on where you’re standing, and “polychroma” as a giant rainbow that sits on two clouds and focuses on celebrating the beauty of diversity.
“I think our artwork is really about kind of a sense of hope and optimism,” said Nicolosi. “I know, sometimes, it feels like the world is kind of a dark place and things can be very overwhelming…we just really want to provide people a moment of just feeling inspired and hopeful and just some joy…that’s what we kind of try to communicate with the art.”
Nicolosi’s team will be in Napa for the installation. She will be in Napa from Jan. 15 to Jan. 18.
To learn more about the Napa Lighted Art Festival, visit donapa.com/lighted-art-festival/. To learn more about Fisher, visit dinafisher.net. To learn more about In Theory Art Studios, visit intheoryartstudios.com.
