‘You’re talking to someone who never had a music lesson in her life and who can’t carry a tune, but was raised in a family where chamber music was played in the living room at family gatherings.”

So explains Kit Neustadter, the tireless promoter of classical music and the longtime director of Occidental’s 26-year-old Redwood Arts Council, the quizzically titled organization that produces West Sonoma County’s longest-running chamber music series. Named over a quarter-century ago for what was to have been an umbrella institution supporting an array of arts and artists, the Redwood Arts Council’s one great success has been its music series.

The name stuck even though it suggests something more than a beloved, remarkably successful string of world-class concerts featuring musicians from all around the world performing in downtown Occidental. For Neustadter, who recently spent the evening with a team of eight music-loving volunteers stuffing, labeling, sticking and otherwise preparing over 150 pounds of flyers, posters and brochures, the Redwood Arts Council is a true labor of love, inspired by her lifelong love of music.

“As a kid growing up in Cleveland and St. Louis, there was always chamber music,” she says. “When one of my uncles would perform on the violin, I’d end up sitting on the floor with the dogs and the other kids, listening to this wonderful music. I grew to like it, and even as a teenager, instead of going to the mall, all the teenagers in my family would gather at someone’s home and listen to chamber music.”

Growing up among musicians–musicians who knew some of the great players and composers, and often had them over for dinner and a recital–Neustadter took a stab at learning the recorder, but realized that she was better off as a supporter and fan than as an actual musician. “I never really got the recorder,” she laughs. “I still can’t get a low C on the thing.”

In 1980, working with Council cofounder Janet Green, she launched an ambitious 15-show chamber music series using the acoustically rich, 130-year-old Occidental Community Church as a setting. It soon became a fixture of that small town’s cultural life, and eventually began to draw music fans from all around the county and beyond.

The current series, which began last weekend with a concert by the violin-mandolin ensemble Galanterie, will feature a total of nine concerts this year, including performances by the multinational Nobilis Trio, the excitingly contemporary Euclid String Quartet and North Bay master harpist Patrick Ball. Over the years, the series has become more than just an entertaining novelty; it has served as a launching pad for many novice groups, even hosting the now world-renowned Kronos Quartet back when the modern ensemble were still performing Beethoven.

Green eventually left the Redwood Arts Council to pursue other projects, but rather than abandon the mighty little organization, Neustadter elected to forge ahead on her own, with the help of a dedicated group of volunteers. “I couldn’t let it go,” she says. “How could I? It’s just such a wonderful thing to be a part of.”

While allowing that selecting, hiring, promoting, hosting and even feeding dozens of internationally assorted musicians each year is a stupefying amount of work, Neustadter says she always remembers why she does it whenever the latest ensemble or soloist sits down and begins to play.

“I love the concerts!” she says. “I used to joke that I do all this just so I can have these great, intimate concerts in my own town instead of having to drive to San Francisco to hear a concert in a giant concert hall. I get a rush from every single concert we produce.”

Aside from the personal benefits of having beautiful music played in her virtual front yard, Neustadter says she is motivated to keep going by her belief that chamber music, performed up close in an intimate setting by magnificent performers, can be a life-changing, life-enriching experience.

“Sometimes I wonder how all of this measures up to the kinds of things I could be doing with my life,” she muses. “I could be making sure that our environment doesn’t turn to complete poison or working to get us out of the war in Iraq or seeing to it that starving people get food, and sometimes I feel a little guilty. Then I hear the music and see the faces of the audiences listening, and I remember that the soul needs nourishment too. That’s why I do what I do–because music really does transform and feed the soul. And I’m lucky that I get to be a part of that.”

–David Templeton

One recent foggy afternoon at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA), an intern was running around setting up AV equipment in the former military barrack. He and a seasoned staff member were preparing for a draft of sorts. The next day, a jury was to converge to discuss who would win admission to the organization’s prestigious artist residency program for 2007. The program is highly selective; of 600 applicants from all over the world, only some 40 will be invited into the program.

The HCA is lodged in a handsome grouping of nine former military barracks that once composed Fort Barry on the majestic, windswept coast of the Marin Headlands. It’s about 15 minutes and one light-year away from the bustle of San Francisco. The moment one emerges from a one-lane tunnel off of Highway 101, a veil of thick mist blankets the dunes.

During the ’80s and ’90s, the HCA commissioned some of its barracks to be creatively renovated by respected contemporary artists: David Ireland, Ann Hamilton, Leonard Hunter and architect Mark Mack. There’s even an award-winning unisex latrine, complete with a Duchampian row of nonfunctional urinals, standing like sentries against the wall. Time seems to tick slowly at HCA, as if impeded by the dense fog, which executive director Gary Sangster likens to what one would find in Scotland. Another employee suggests that the HCA has a kind of magic about it. Truly, the wooly cloud seems to create a whole other world–a cradle for artists percolating ideas.

More than 700 creative minds have come through the HCA’s residency program since it was founded by local artists in 1987. Among the residents have been seminal American figures, including Sonoma County artist Ned Kahn, the Foundry dance company and urban-inspired creator Julie Mehretu, who last year won a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship (the fourth HCA alum, Kahn included, to do so).

Although the residencies are wildly difficult to land–a third of them exclusively reserved for California artists–the HCA conducts an array of other programs, maximizing itself as a resource for the local and extended community. It runs educational programs, providing artist talks, conducting open houses and allowing frequent public interaction with a selected artist each session. There are also studios for newly minted MFA artists, an affiliate artist program with subsidized studio rent, and even “Close Calls,” an annual exhibit highlighting the work of artists who almost, but didn’t quite, make it into the residency program.

The HCA is a unique organization, prioritizing not art production but, rather, artistic process and reflection. Unlike many residency programs, no formal product is required of the artists, who usually stay in residency for between one and three months; experimentation is highly encouraged, whatever the results. Sangster explains: “Failure is the difference between what you set out to find and what you do find. It’s not negative.”

One prime way the HCA facilitates innovation is by providing a social environment for resident artists to emerge from their on-site studios and exchange ideas. Five nights a week, everyone dines together in the cozy mess hall/kitchen, renovated by noteworthy contemporary artist Ann Hamilton. The mess hall features two hearths: one, a mammoth wood-burning stove where fresh bread is baked twice a week; the other, a more decorative masonry stove imported from Northern Europe.

The chipper young chef, Katie Powers, concocts organic, gourmet dinners. On this early afternoon, she has already started preparing dinner in the warm kitchen, planning to serve wild salmon with ProvenÁal tomato, fennel and saffron broth and basil aioli; mixed greens with Easter egg radishes, shaved Parmesan and sherry vinegar; and Calvados-roasted pears and almonds with whipped mascarpone.

Making tea in the kitchen is one of the artists-in-residence, Christian Maychack, 33. He arrived the day before, and is already hard at work on a sculpture due soon for the California Biennial in Orange County. The baby-faced Maychack says, “I think there’s a summer-camp feel to this place, because you can let your guard down.”

How about a very intellectual, creative, sophisticated summer camp. The only bug juice you’d find here would be part of an art project.

–Brett Ascarelli

Margrit Biever Mondavi, the first lady of Napa arts patronage, cuts a tiny figure in the airy art gallery at Robert Mondavi Winery. On a recent late summer day, she conferred with photographer Terence Ford (Harrison’s brother) and a friend of his as the two men picked her brain about how best to arrange an upcoming exhibit of Ford’s photographs. Mrs. Mondavi, who practiced art for many years herself, considers before admitting that she has no easy answer. “It is a very hard thing to hang a show,” she says.

She should know, having curated dozens of rotating exhibitions at the winery by such important 20th-century artists as Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn and Helen Frankenthaler over the past 20-odd years.

Mrs. Mondavi has been a dynamic fixture at the winery since 1967, and seems quite comfortable keeping up her ambitious pace, particularly as the winery celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with a series of events. She has not only built the Robert Mondavi Winery’s reputation as a welcoming home for the arts, but has also set that relationship as a standard for other area wineries.

Usually referred to simply as Margrit (pronounced “Margaret”) by most who know her, one can’t help but write about her as “Mrs. Mondavi.” It’s not that she herself is formal, but rather that her gravitas demands extra respect. That said, her vibrancy is down-to-earth and warm. For this interview, she pulls her chair up very close, her voice undulating with excitement as she explains the start of the famous Great Chefs series, only one of a host of pioneering arts contributions she has made in almost four decades of working with her husband at their winery. Her chefs series brought luminaries such as Julia Child, Alice Waters, Simone Beck and Wolfgang Puck to the winery’s kitchen over the course of the last 30 years.

Leaning forward in her chair, Mrs. Mondavi explains that her husband had always wanted a food and wine program. “Wine and food is a natural,” she says. But at first, there was no great American cuisine. Elaborating on the Dark Ages of American culinary arts, she says, “The advent of the freezer meant that you could have people over and do nothing–just serve last week’s frozen lasagna and cut up a little lettuce. There was no cooking.” Naturellement, the first chefs of the series were all French. Finally, a few years into the program, America started developing its own great chefs, who were invited to participate in the series.

“I was deeply involved in what they were doing,” says Mrs. Mondavi, who translated for many of the chefs who didn’t speak English (she speaks six languages, including household Japanese). “But I had to listen carefully, because they knew when I translated something the wrong way,” she says. How did it feel to interact with the likes of Jean Troisgros, Marcella Hazan, Thomas Keller and Jacques Pépin? “When you’re in the presence of genius–it’s extraordinary,” she says simply.

Mrs. Mondavi grew up during World War II in a village near Locarno, in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. “My mother cooked like an angel,” she says, adding that “sardines were the only thing that weren’t rationed. My mother would trade her soul for butter.” When asked what her favorite dish was that her mother used to cook, Mrs. Mondavi’s large blue eyes look distant. “Everything!” she exclaims. After a moment she adds, “I have never had chicken as good.”

Three years ago, Mrs. Mondavi collaborated with her own daughter, Annie Roberts, who served as the winery’s executive chef for 27 years, to write Annie and Margrit: Recipes and Stories from the Robert Mondavi Kitchen.

Beyond the culinary arts, Mrs. Mondavi has orchestrated the winery’s famously successful Summer Festival music series. She threw the first one in 1969, just three years after the winery began. “We borrowed the chairs from the church and a portable stage from the local high school,” she recalls. Since then, such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, Ray Charles and Benny Goodman have taken the stage (the winery has its own now). The festivals have raised some $2 million, benefiting community organizations, in particular the Napa Valley Symphony.

Mrs. Mondavi has donated generously to the restoration of the Napa Valley Opera House, where a theater is named in her honor. She and her husband also recently built the eponymous, state-of-the-art performing arts center at UC Davis, and this summer she launched the innovative Taste3 food, wine and art conference at COPIA.

But Mrs. Mondavi doesn’t just support the arts, she understands them. She says that her husband has often wished that he could be an artist in his next life, telling her, “As an artist, you can do what you want; express yourself.” But she quips with savvy, “You ain’t got any idea about what it’s like to be an artist. Often you have to fit a mold. It’s not as free as you think it is.”

Her candid and subtle grasp of the creative struggle make Mrs. Mondavi a truly perfect patron of the arts.

–Brett Ascarelli