Artist Alexandra Grant on Launching a New Wine and Learn how to See Nice Artwork When You Journey

When Alexandra Grant was 12, her mom introduced her to a restaurant in Paris and ordered her a Coca-Cola. The server advised the pair that Coke wasn’t good for a younger lady and introduced them a bottle of wine and two glasses as an alternative.

Grant, a celebrated visible artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, brings this vibrant, top-up-my-wine-glass power to journey and her intensive slate of artistic tasks. She’s identified for her exhibitions world wide; most just lately, Grant debuted putting neon items at Warsaw’s Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature and silk-screen, acrylic, and coloured pencil collages at France’s CAPC Musée d’artwork Contemporain de Bordeaux. (She’s additionally made headlines as Keanu Reeves’ girlfriend.)

This month, the worldwide philanthropist launched a glowing wine with Sonoma County’s J Vineyards & Vineyard referred to as Love Wine—proper in time for Valentine’s Day. A portion of the gross sales from the super-approachable, scrumptious brut cuvée advantages her grantLOVE basis, which helps feminine and BIPOC artists.

“I am satisfied making a bottle of wine is so much like making a murals,” Grant advised me once we met on the Love Wine preview at J Vineyards & Vineyard in Healdsburg, California. One other similarity, she identified, is that they’re each for any traveler. Wine and artwork might be your raison de voyager, whether or not you’re a Klimt connoisseur and an avid oenophile, or somebody who likes a glass of white wine at a Parisian café and pokes their head right into a gallery in a stylish neighborhood.

“You may enter from all completely different ranges,” Grant mentioned. “And each wine and artwork are extra accessible than folks assume. I believe they see it on that sort of increased degree, like, ‘this is not for me, proper?’” However each are for a wider viewers, she insisted. That’s one of many targets of Love Wine; you may nerd out over the glowing wine’s dosage—100% pinot meunier, per award-winning Sonoma winemaker Nicole Hitchcock—and beautiful label, designed by interdisciplinary artist Genevieve Gaignard. However you too can see it as a scrumptious and terribly fairly bottle of bubbly that transports you to the Northern California coast in a single sip.

When Grant and I sat down the following day at Farmhouse Inn, I advised her my purpose was to see extra artwork after I traveled. How ought to somebody like me—who took one artwork historical past class in faculty—truly try this?

“I believe avenue artwork is a good way,” Grant mentioned. “Actually social media can play a constructive function in discovery. I believe a good way to search out out about an artwork scene is to go to a bookstore that has a very good artwork e book choice, as a result of artists and curators and intellectuals are going to go to that place to purchase their books, too.”

Grant has good luck discovering native artwork reveals from postings at bookshops as a result of she tends to journey with locals quite than hitting a vacation spot’s must-see sights. “I am not so eager about tourism,” she mentioned. “I discover it actually complicated, the concept I need to go stand in line and have a look at one thing and be sizzling.”

As a substitute, she loves to hunt out a recent artwork museum, which she mentioned is a superb entry level for neophtye artwork followers. “After I was just a little lady, I bear in mind going to the Museo Tamayo in Mexico Metropolis, and seeing Hockney for the primary time—there’s something that is past language about artwork. I understood then it was like a global code, you realize, that artwork and the curiosity in it’s shared internationally.”

Lately, Grant has been recurrently touring to Poland for work and plans to return to South Korea this yr for an exhibition on the Plastic Artwork Seoul present in Could 2025.

“I really like the meals in Korea, and the humor, even simply the truth that the staff I work with calls me Grant due to the best way the language works,” she advised me. “After which I simply began going to Poland within the final 4 years—actually thrilling place to go to, very attention-grabbing delicacies, structure, and lots of dedication to tradition in a approach that is very completely different from different locations.”

As we wrapped up our rainy-day hangout, we ran via the tried-and-true journey questions (favourite aircraft film?). Seems, even Grant’s inflight routine revolves round artwork.  

“My go-to transfer is to look at the newest animated film on the aircraft; I’m usually within the children’ film part. I’m the most important fan of the artistry and the expertise that goes into making these tales,” she mentioned.

There you have got it: Touring for artwork begins at takeoff. For the total inspired-by-Alexandra-Grant journey remedy, order an in-flight glass of wine, too. Coca-Cola’s unhealthy for you.