“The Garden” Mural

San Francisco Bay Area artist Allison Tinati, who paints under the name “Hueman,” created a breathtaking, large-scale mural to cover 2,700-square-feet of corrugated iron on the south and west façades of the building. Using more than 100 cans of spray paint, she crafted an abstract interpretation of “food as art,” drawing inspiration from the CIA’s gardens.

Painted in only six days, the mural, funded by the Culinary Institute of America, was the ninth commissioned by the Rail Arts District Napa, (RAD), a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing art to a two-mile stretch that runs from Oxbow to Redwood Road along the Napa Valley Wine Train tracks and the Napa Valley Vine Trail.

A native of Oakland, CA, Allison Tinati has painted murals for more than a decade in locations as wide ranging as Miami, Florida, New Jersey, Hawaii, Mexico, and now, in Napa. Her work has been featured in Juxtapoz magazine, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, and Hi Fructose magazine. Tinati is known for her colorful mash-ups of the abstract and figurative, creating motion and three-dimensional images on flat surfaces. The surroundings informed Tinati’s creative choices. “The lettuce from Copia’s famed gardens reminded me of flowers,” Tinati said. “So, I added some imagery of red butter lettuce and splashes of green from the plants throughout the garden to create an abstracted design representative of CIA’s mission with food.”