Invaders: Julio César Morales Explores California History in Dialogue With the di Rosa Permanent Collection

Invaders: Vallejo, Food, and the Making of California runs through Feb. 6, 2027, at di Rosa SF in partnership with Minnesota Street Project Foundation.

SAN FRANCISCO , CA, UNITED STATES, October 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — di Rosa and Minnesota Street Project Foundation are pleased to present Invaders: Vallejo, Food, and the Making of California, an exhibition in which Tijuana-born, Bay Area-based artist Julio César Morales uses food to explore histories of conquest, migration and cultural exchange. The exhibition opens on Nov. 7, 2026, at di Rosa SF with a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. and runs through Feb. 6, 2027.

The exhibition presents the most extensive view to date of Interrupted Passage, an ongoing food-based project Morales has developed in collaboration with Max La Rivière-Hedrick since 2006. The exhibition also introduces a dynamic new model for artist engagement with the di Rosa collection. By pairing his food-based practice with selected collection works, Morales activates the collection as a living archive, transforming food from something we consume into a medium through which histories are transmitted, contested and remembered.

Interrupted Passage considers the meal as a site of political negotiation and cultural exchange. The project takes inspiration from a feast hosted in 1846 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the Mexican military commander of Northern California, as California was passing from Mexican to U.S. control. When an armed militia arrived to take him prisoner, Vallejo chose to negotiate through radical hospitality rather than armed resistance, inviting his captors into his home. The resulting meal placed Vallejo in an extraordinary position: both host and hostage, negotiating the future of California from his own dining room.

For the past 20 years, Morales and La Rivière-Hedrick have continually reimagined this historical encounter through a series of eight-hour meals performed for audiences across California and Mexico. Morales also collaborated with filmmaker Daniel Gorrell to create a two-channel video installation presented in the exhibition. Staged and filmed at Vallejo’s historic home with costumed actors, the work evokes the original encounter through an impressionistic sequence of gestures, objects and details: a hand knocking on a rose-colored door, soldiers waiting in the parlor, cleavers moving through vegetables, utensils circulating around a table and the general’s composed expression. In place of dialogue, ambient sounds and an electronic score collapse the distance between a historical event and our fraught present.

By recreating the feast as a contemporary social and sensory experience, Interrupted Passage asks how food can become a form of diplomacy, resistance, accommodation and survival, and how seemingly intimate acts of hospitality can take part in larger political transformations. For the first time, the exhibition explores the full scope of this ambitious, multidisciplinary project, bringing together video, sculpture, photography and ephemera alongside new video and sound installations.

Presented alongside the expansive installation of Interrupted Passage are artworks from the di Rosa collection. Works by Joan Brown, Enrique Chagoya and Carlos Villa, among others, enter into a visual and conceptual call-and-response with Morales’ practice, opening a broader conversation around Vallejo’s experience and the enduring questions this historic event raises about belonging, power and cultural exchange.

The title, Morales insists, is posed as a question. In a state that is continually remade through encounter and negotiation, the exhibition asks who counts as an invader, who counts as a local and how those labels change over time. “Through food and the rituals surrounding it,” he said, “the exhibition asks how histories of invasion and migration settle into the body, how they linger in taste and memory, in the hands that prepare a meal, in the stories passed from one generation to another, and in the strangers that become guests at our table.”

“Minnesota Street Project was built on the idea that art belongs at the center of civic life, and Invaders puts that idea to work,” said Andy Rappaport, co-founder of Minnesota Street Project.

The conversations the exhibition prompts will continue through a series of live food activations open to the public. At an Interactive Artist Talk on Saturday, Dec. 5, 2026, from 5 to 7 p.m., Morales will discuss his food-based projects and the broader intersections of food, art and migration that inform his practice. Afterward, visitors will join the artist for homemade food and continue the exchange around the table. On Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2027, from 1 to 3 p.m., Morales will lead a Caesar Salad Making Workshop exploring the surprising cultural history of the iconic dish. On Saturday, Feb. 6, 2027, at 7 p.m., an experimental multicourse dinner will consider the table as a site for encountering California’s historical patterns of invasion, settlement and exchange through food. Taking Interrupted Passage as a point of departure, the evening will bring artists, historians and food practitioners together around a shared meal to consider how California came to taste the way it does and how its identity continues to evolve through conflict, survival and exchange.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Morales and La Rivière-Hedrick’s collaborative projects have been exhibited and commissioned by institutions including the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, LAXART in Los Angeles, Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York, Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and the Current:LA Public Art Triennial, among others.

Morales’ own artwork has been shown at the Lyon Biennale in Lyon, France; the Istanbul Biennial in Istanbul, Turkey; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Singapore Biennale; the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany; Prospect.3 in New Orleans; SFMOMA in San Francisco; MEWO Kunsthalle in Memmingen, Germany; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California.

di Rosa SF is the San Francisco gallery of di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, a nonprofit art center based in Napa Valley, California. The gallery is located at Minnesota Street Project, 1150 25th St., in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Invaders: Vallejo, Food, and the Making of California is on view there from Nov. 7, 2026, through Feb. 6, 2027. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The opening reception on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026, from 5 to 7 p.m. is open to the public.

ABOUT DI ROSA CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Founded by Rene and Veronica di Rosa, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is a nonprofit art center and home to the world’s foremost collection of Northern California art, with more than 1,600 works. Set in the Carneros region of Napa Valley, di Rosa’s Napa campus features galleries, a sculpture meadow with nearly 80 outdoor works and a serene lake, all dedicated to its founding mission of art and nature. di Rosa San Francisco, at Minnesota Street Project, brings the collection into the heart of the city. For more information, visit www.dirosaart.org.

ABOUT MINNESOTA STREET PROJECT FOUNDATION
Minnesota Street Project Foundation provides access to the space, tools and support infrastructure that artists at all career stages need to create new work. The foundation fulfills its mission through below-market-rate studios, artist residencies and the presentation of contemporary art. For more information, visit www.minnesotastreetproject.com.

Rachel Miers
di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art
+1 925-787-7557
rachel.miers@dirosaart.org
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook