Mendocino, Marijuana, and the Art of Authenticity: A Conversation with Meghann Sommer
It’s hard to know exactly when Art Academy of Cincinnati alumni Meghann Sommer became the kind of person whose front porch would wrap around a farmhouse in Mendocino County, California, the way a warm dog curls around your feet. Maybe it was somewhere on that breezy hilltop, with a concrete fountain out back that looks like a prop from a Sofia Coppola film. Or maybe it was earlier — in Cincinnati warehouses with $100 rent and a gallery show around every corner, or in Seattle making jewelry to survive a housing crisis that felt more like a collective dare than an economic event.
Fifteen years ago, she was a fresh art grad from Cincinnati. Now she’s mother to two feral children (her words, and a high compliment), co-pilot of a regulated, licensed cannabis business called Henry’s Original, steward of olive groves and sheep, spinner of fibers, keeper of dyes, and low-key philosopher on authenticity in an age of AI-generated everything.
If you ask her how she ended up here — 100 acres of vines, sheep that need shearing by hand, marketing plans scrawled in dusty notebooks — she won’t give you a linear answer. Because there isn’t one. It was jewelry, then regulated cannabis cultivation during the early days of California’s medical marijuana expansion, then olives, then wool, and then expanded permits to grow cannabis again — like a cosmic pinball game lit by headlamps and Mendocino moonlight.
She describes her life the way you might describe a half-remembered dream: “I didn’t know I was ready for kids, wasn’t opposed, but didn’t know anyone who had them. Turns out I like it. Turns out they’re wild and that’s perfect.”
Art school taught her to commodify creativity, but the farm taught her to grow it, literally. In a world where branding is increasingly made in digital Petri dishes, Meghann prefers the grit of a 35mm camera, the smell of lanolin on raw wool, the sting of compost under fingernails. As branding goes Henry’s Original (co-owned) exemplifies these nuggets of truth of the farm life, and Lima Ranch olive oil celebrates the organic boutique nature of their heritage stand of trees, generations of tending and cultivating.
This is, make no mistake, a serious business — one that operates with strict permits, state licenses, and rigorous regulatory compliance, just like any other large-scale agricultural enterprise. Thirty-five employees show up at peak harvest to work the gardens, trim, process, and package every single leaf by hand. It’s all organic, obsessively so: flowers are planted between rows of cannabis to invite good bugs, heal the soil, and cut down on chemical anything. In July, the seasonal choreography hits full swing — the first cannabis harvest overlaps with the sheep shearer’s annual trek back up the mountain, ten friends (some paid, some paid in good vibes and dinner) sorting and baling wool under a playlist that sounds like a Mendocino love letter.
We’re not saying an art degree guarantees you’ll end up living joyfully off-grid with a license to grow boutique cannabis varietals. But we are saying it gives you the instinct to follow your own weird, wild path, the confidence to lean into uncertainty, and a community that sticks around when the plan inevitably shape-shifts into something better than you imagined.
Somewhere in there — in the marigold seeds handed out free at the register, in the kids sprinting feral across the fields, in the dye plants humming under the Mendocino sun — is the through-line she’s been looking for all along.
She’s still making. Still restless. Still, in her words, “playing and making because that’s all I’ve ever known to do.”
And as for that advice from her old professor Dianne K. Smith back at the Art Academy of Cincinnati? “Speak with confidence. You deserve to be the confident one.” Meghann’s been taking that advice ever since — only now, the classroom is 600 acres wide, tightly regulated, fully permitted, and smells like olive oil, compost, and the sticky green promise of a rapidly evolving California industry.
If you know an alumni with a story to tell reach out. We want to hear how they got to their destination. marketing@artacademy.edu.
