Sonoma County Preserves was created for Hybrid Fields: Artists Exploring our Food Systems, a group exhibition at the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, California in October 2006. Ranging from jams and pickles to vinegars and salmon jerky, the project presented a wide variety of home-preserved foods that residents of Sonoma county had grown, foraged or hunted for, which they had preserved for future use. Participation was free and entries were solicited across the county through newspaper advertisements, email lists and bulletin boards.

Participants were asked to include two entries of their preserve, and to write a short text, memory or story that related to it. All of the preserves were displayed on shelves in the gallery, and the display grew over the course of the exhibition. The submissions ranged from jams and jellies, to cured olives, hot salsa and fig vinegar.

Sonoma County Preserves culminated in a day-long “opening”, an event where each of the entries was opened and tasted by both museum visitors and a panel of five judges; a museum trustee, a local dealer of antiquarian cookbooks, a radio talk show host, and an art collector. After a two hour tasting, sun-dried heirloom tomatoes preserved in olive oil were chosen as the penultimate preserve. Their creator, Vincent Valentine was awarded a cash prize of $100.00 and the preserve was accessioned, along with a portrait of its creator, into the Sonoma County Museums permanent collection.

The over-arching situation of an art museum exhibition about “art and agriculture” was a central point of context for Sonoma County Preserves, which builds on a basic act of juxtaposition. The Sonoma County Museum is, similarly, a container for collecting, storing and preserving the products of cultural industry, a location that exercises judgment, taste and selection. While preserves and preserving generally speak to both sustenance and memory, a museums’ economy of cultivation, which builds on concepts of rarity and
selection, contrasts strongly with the personal and social economies of home food preservation, based, as they are, upon conditions of momentary bounty and surplus. In the exhibition space of a museum, Sonoma County Preserves creates a situation where two separate cultural traditions of preservation overlap.