In 2020, eleven bronze portrait busts were installed along the walkway leading to the Culinary Arts Building at Napa Valley College’s St. Helena campus — a tribute to the pioneers of the New Cuisine movement that took root in California through the 1970s. Narsai David, Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters, and Robert Mondavi are among the eleven honored, each set on its own concrete column rising out of the lawn in front of the building’s entrance.
Fred approached the busts the way he approaches any portrait: less concerned with an exact likeness than with catching something of the person behind the food they made famous — the same instinct that drew him, years earlier, to sculpt Julia Child for the Portraiture gallery. Seen together, the eleven face the entrance to the school where the next generation of cooks studies, a garden of the movement’s own founders.
