Art on the Property

Unexpected Moments Throughout the Estate

Napa 487 Winery & Spa is honored to feature five remarkable Seward Johnson sculptures, thoughtfully placed throughout the property to create a destination unlike any other. As confirmed by The Seward Johnson Atelier, which attracts over 250,000 visitors per year, Napa 487 Winery & Spa is home to the largest collection of Seward Johnson sculptures in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia-offering guests a rare blend of art, refined wine, scenic beauty, and tranquil spa experiences worth traveling for.

Napa 487 is under construction and coming soon!

A Word on the Artist

Seward Johnson (1930–2020) devoted his life to a singular proposition: that the ordinary is sacred. Cast in bronze with an obsessive eye for the human particular — the wrinkle at a knuckle, the slump of a shoulder, the weight carried in a grocery bag — his figures materialize from the landscape as though they have always lived there, waiting to be noticed. His Celebrating the Familiar series has stirred wonder on the streets of Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, and New York. Now, here among the vines, they are yours to discover.

Holding Out — Lady with Groceries

Arms laden with the abundance of a good day’s market, she holds her ground with the quiet, ironclad dignity of a woman who has always managed. Johnson lavished upon her every detail: the topography of aged hands, the specific heft of each parcel, the set of a jaw that has long since made peace with standing still until the world comes around.

Look closely and you will find spaghetti, bread, perhaps a wedge of something sharp and good tucked into her bags. She is, for many of us, someone we have loved. She is, for all of us, a small monument to the daily labor of keeping a life well-stocked and a table ready for those who matter most.

My Dog Has Fleas

The title is a musician’s joke, the mnemonic children use to remember how to tune a guitar string by string, and Johnson is very much in on it. His folk singer sits absorbed and unhurried, a man for whom the entire afternoon exists inside the chord he is working out. Music was a cornerstone of Johnson’s family and his philosophy alike.

He believed that playing and singing in the company of others was among the most essential exercises of a life fully lived. Here he immortalizes not the stage or the spotlight, but the quietly radical act of playing for its own sake, for the pleasure of the sound and the gift of an afternoon given wholly to something you love.

Taking Stock

There is a moment, unhurried and inward, when a person pauses to reckon with where they stand. Not anxiously, but with the considered stillness of someone who has learned that attention itself is a form of wisdom. Johnson captures this interior pause with his characteristic fidelity to the truth of the human pose.

To encounter this figure among the vines, where the light moves slowly and the grapes are themselves an exercise in patient accumulation, is to be gently reminded that taking inventory of what one values, what one has made, and what remains is not a pause from living. It may well be the most essential part of it.

Sidewalk Judge

Every community has one. Settled onto a bench with the easy authority of long tenure, watching the world conduct itself with an appraising and faintly ironic eye, the Sidewalk Judge has witnessed enough of human theater to have formed opinions, and accumulated enough grace to know the finest ones need not be spoken aloud. Johnson, who famously declared propriety his mortal enemy, was deeply sympathetic to this figure. No institution, no credential, no ticket required. Just a good vantage point and a lifetime of paying attention.

Here at Napa 487, the judge has found a particularly fine seat, and one suspects the vineyard, the valley, and the guests passing with their glasses raised are all receiving a verdict of quiet, hard-won approval.

Wine, Food and Thou

She moves with the easy lightness of someone who has planned something genuinely delicious. Picnic basket in hand, a destination in mind, the gorgeous afternoon stretched out before her.

The title is borrowed from Omar Khayyám’s Rubaiyat, that ancient Persian ode to the pleasures of the present moment, and it distills the sentiment with perfect simplicity: a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and the company of someone you love. Here among the vines of Napa 487 she arrives like a quiet benediction, walking toward the very thing you came for. She is not rushing. Neither should you.

Experience It in Person

The art at Napa 487 is meant to be discovered as you move through the property, revealing itself in unexpected moments along the way.