A New Harvest, A New Canvas: Six Years of Artist Labels at Frantoio Grove

Before the artist series, our Olio Nuovo labels were simple. A local printer made sheets that said “Olio Nuovo” and the year, using the same restrained serif type and muted colors as the rest of our bottles. Nothing was wrong with them. They did the job, but I thought we could do more.

Olio Nuovo is the first oil of our harvest, bottled fresh and sold for a short stretch each year. Everything about it is tied to one moment. The olives have just come off the trees. The mill has just started running. The oil is vivid, green and alive in a way that refuses to sit quietly in the background. Putting a simple label on it started to feel like a missed opportunity.

We had hoped to work with Erin Salazar on the first edition, but the timing didn’t work out. This has become something of a theme. Every year we promise ourselves we’re going to start earlier, and sure enough we find ourselves scrambling to get these labels finalized and printed in time for photography and all the other backend logistics we do to get our oil out.

Anyways, Erin needed more time, so we moved her collaboration to the following year. I still wanted the first bottle to look different.

We had just finished the Quonset hut that houses part of our farm and mill operation. Its front had a loose geometric pattern inspired by Mondrian, with blocks of color overlapping and showing through one another. I borrowed the general feeling, (not the artwork), and made up a fun label for our old bottle. I think I put it together in an afternoon.

It was graphic design, not great art. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it was bright, odd and unapologetic. On a shelf surrounded by handsome, traditional olive oil bottles, it looked like it had wandered in from somewhere else.

That first year set the tone. The label did not need to resemble the rest of our packaging. It did not need to explain the oil. It just needed to make room for something different.

There is a real difference between hiring a graphic designer to make a package and asking an artist to make a piece of art that will eventually become a package.

A skilled package designer may make something beautiful, but the work still begins with a brand, a customer and a message that must come through. Our process runs in the other direction. We ask an artist to make art. Afterward, we work out where the Frantoio Grove name, the bottle size, required copy and barcode can live without smothering it.

The brief is open on purpose. We share the farm, the animals, the oil and the odd little details that may be useful. We explain what must legally appear on the bottle. And then we say, in no uncertain terms, do whatever you want, and have fun.

There are a few limits. Nothing pornographic. Nothing gory. Nothing spookier than Maurice Sendak. Beyond that, the outside of the bottle can change completely. The oil inside still has to be excellent. That is the fixed part.

Of course, “do whatever you want” only works because we choose the artist first. We look at the full body of work, not one image that happens to catch our eye. We need to believe that their instincts are interesting even when they move in a direction we would never have chosen ourselves.

Artist selection is the guardrail. Once that choice is made, the point is to stop steering.

We also pay artists for their work. This is not a “do it for the exposure” arrangement. We ask what the project will cost and, in general, we do not haggle. Supporting artists while giving them room to make something that feels like theirs is not a side benefit of the program. It is the program.

Erin Salazar was the first artist we approached, and her 2022 bottle was the first edition I think of as a true artist label.

I knew Erin through San José. We had crossed paths around restaurants and the local arts community, and she ran Local Color, a nonprofit that found unused downtown spaces and turned them into working studios for artists. For a while, she was also our next door neighbor.

A farm visit did not work with our schedules, so I took my phone out on the quad and made her a rough video tour. I drove past the dead sycamore where hawks nest, the oak where the kites hang out, the creek and the places where we see wildlife. I talked through the farm as I saw it.

What came back was a dark, moonlit piece filled with plants, hand drawn lettering and the feeling of a farm after daylight has left. Erin made the art. Her husband, Ben Henderson, helped with some of the final layout and production work.

The response was completely different from the first year. People had been delighted that our 2021 bottle looked strange. Erin’s label made them stop. It was beautiful, detailed and unmistakably a piece of art.

That changed the stakes, in a good way.

Like a lot of people, I spent too much of the pandemic scrolling through TikTok. Social media is mostly bad for the brain, but every once in a while it puts something extraordinary in front of you.

That is how I found KAZLAND.

He posted time lapse videos of his paintings taking shape, full of strange creatures, crooked energy and worlds that felt a little off center. I tend to love art, music and food that are not classically pretty. Tom Waits makes more sense to me than a perfectly polished pop song. KAZLAND’s work had that same pull. It was wild, funny, beautiful and entirely sure of itself.

We worked remotely. A few emails, a brief, a price, then he made the art.

The result was not an olive oil label in any normal sense. It was a complete painting with its own creature and world. We added the name and required copy afterward. That is very close to the purest form of what I want this program to be.

It also became the first design we carried beyond the bottle. A rectangular painting does not always sit naturally on a shirt, so we worked out a second, stripped down version of the creature for shirts and stickers. The art had escaped the label.

I first noticed Harumo Sato’s work on a mural I passed while driving home. Her colors were nothing like the first two artist editions. Erin and KAZLAND had made radically different images, but both lived in darker palettes. Harumo’s work opened the windows.

She came to the farm in late spring, when California is briefly and almost absurdly green. The cover crops were tall. Wild plants and thistles were mixed through the rows. We manage a lot of the vegetation with sheep, and we do not mow the grove into a neat green carpet. Walking through it means lifting your knees to wade through the grass.

That mattered. She could see that, when we talk about letting the soil live, we mean it in a physical sense. The farm is not tidy scenery. Plants are growing, insects are moving, animals are cycling nutrients, and the llama is keeping an eye on everybody.

Harumo turned that visit into a two sided piece. On the front, a woman embraces the hills and stands for the soil and life of the farm. On the back, the llama keeps watch among wildflowers. One side holds the day, the other the night.

She built the original with acrylic, oil pastel and sumi brush lettering, then handled the full label production herself. Later, the Sun Girl and llama each became their own shirt.

Of all the ways we have worked with artists, this was the fullest version of the process: she came here, walked the farm, asked questions, got close to the animals, then made something that could only have come from that visit.

Claire and I got married in 2025. It was wonderful. It was not especially helpful for staying ahead of an annual packaging schedule.

By the time we looked up, harvest was getting close and we had not found an artist. A wide open art commission takes time. Freedom does not make creative work faster.

We called our friend Makenzie Henry.

Makenzie makes beautiful watercolor work, but she is not building a public career around it or seeking out commissions. She had done other pieces for us, and she was Claire’s maid of honor. She knew exactly why we were behind.

She also knew about the crows.

Crows live all over the farm. They used to follow the tractor when we disked the fields because we turned up worms. Now they get excited when we turn the compost pile. Some farms have spent a great deal of energy trying to keep crows away. We like them.

Closer to home, a bonded pair joined Claire, Rupert and me on our morning walks. They raised chicks that followed us for a while, then left to begin crow lives of their own. Makenzie painted two crows on olive branches as a stand in for Claire and me. One speaks to the other in a small bubble: “Olio Nuovo.”

It is personal without being precious, and funny without turning the bottle into a joke. Because Makenzie knew us, she made a label no distant artist could have made.

We met Rayos Magos at an art walk in San José’s Japantown. I recognized him from around town, though we had never met. Claire and I walked away from his booth, looked through more of his work, then came back and asked whether he might want to make an olive oil label.

He did.

Rayos works across printmaking, collage, painting, textiles and sculpture. His two designs for us share hands, plants, clouds and fields, but they do not feel like duplicates. The Olio Nuovo label is the first half of the thought. The second is brighter, louder and faintly psychedelic.

At first, they were simply two ideas we loved. We considered using both on Olio Nuovo bottles, which would have been a logistical headache. Then something clicked.

For several years we have released a Day Lot, a single lot of oil held apart because it stood out during harvest. The idea came from coffee, where a green coffee buyer may taste several days of production at a mill and find one lot that deserves to remain on its own. I loved the oil, but our old hand stamped label had begun to feel like an afterthought. The product was special. We were not presenting it with much heart.

The second Rayos design solved the problem. We could release one artwork with Olio Nuovo, then bring out its brighter counterpart with Day Lot in the spring. Two oils from one harvest. Two pieces from one artist. Clearly related, entirely their own.

The Day Lot art is our ace in the sleeve. I cannot wait for people to see it, and I’m excited to include a spring release of Day Lot in the artist label program moving forward.

Olive oil is not a sculpture. It should not sit unopened on a shelf because the bottle is pretty.

Olio Nuovo in particular asks you to pay attention now. Open it. Pour it on bread, beans, soup and vegetables. Let it be loud while it is loud. The whole thing belongs to a short season.

That makes a serious piece of art on the bottle feel less wasteful to me, not more. The temporary nature of it may be the most honest part. For a few months, the oil and the artwork exist together. Then the oil is finished and the bottle goes away.

Some people keep the empties on a windowsill. I find that incredibly sweet, even if an oily bottle is not exactly museum material. We have also made postcards, stickers and shirts, and we have plans for totes and bandannas, because I like having something that can stick around.

Still, there is something lovely about art that belongs to the moment. (We are going to make the shirts anyway.)

If you lined up all six editions, the pictures would not show a clean evolution of Frantoio Grove. I do not want them to. Each one records where that artist was at the time.

But the stories around them do trace our lives.

The first bottle came out of a new barn and an afternoon at a computer. KAZLAND arrived through the strange shared habit of pandemic scrolling. Harumo came to the grove when the hills were green and translated the physical place. Makenzie stepped in during the year Claire and I got married and painted us as crows. Rayos helped turn a label series that appeared once each winter into a pair of releases that can frame the whole harvest.

The program has grown because the farm and business have grown. We are getting better at beginning early, documenting the process and giving artists enough time. Future artists may work in textiles, ceramics, flowers or something that does not obviously belong on a flat printed label. I hope more of them can come to the farm. I also hope we stay open enough to be surprised.

We are a farm before anything else. We grow olives, mill them and need people to buy the oil if we want to keep doing the agricultural work we believe in. There is nothing awkward about saying that. I want the artist labels to help sell Olio Nuovo.

But I also want someone to find a bottle years from now and say, “I remember the one with the llama,” or the little critter, the crows, the moon, the hands.

That would mean the oil was not just bought. It was remembered.