Photo by Brett Walker
Alice Warnecke Sutro is an artist and wine producer. She studied Art History for seven years starting with an immersive art history program in high school, then received a BA from Stanford University in Art History. As an undergraduate she studied art abroad in Florence and Moscow and has worked at Cantor Center for the Arts, Tretyakov Gallery and Sonoma County Museum. She pursued studio art and graduated from California College of the Arts MFA program in Painting and Drawing in 2010. That's when she felt the call to return to the land and moved to Healdsburg to work for her family business Warnecke Ranch & Vineyard. She founded the wine label SUTRO in 2012 to highlight the unique volcanic terroir of her family’s one hundred year old property on the Russian River. It was in 2019 that she embarked on the new medium of performative, large-scale, public engagement figurative drawing. She serves on the following boards: Alexander Valley Winegrowers, Creative Sonoma and Chalk Hill Artist Residency.
Alice Warnecke Sutro creates large-scale figurative installations that fully depend on audience interaction. Her live drawing sessions are humorous and lively, but they also reveal a philosophical approach to the nature of art. After many years of experimental drawing, Alice’s practice prioritizes art’s ancient purpose as a community-forming activity for ritual gatherings.
The format for her projects is recurring: she invites participants from a crowd and draws them live, in the moment and with no erasing. The figures are rendered with a sensitive line that demonstrates her love of people, often strangers, with whom she converses the entire time.
In keeping with ritual experiences and inspired by contemporary artists like Marina Abramovich and Matthew Barney, Alice always designs her projects to explore the edge of her physical capacity. Past projects have included tracing figures on a 3-story façade by means of a scissor lift and extension paintbrushes, and drawing visitors at an art fair for 2 days straight in record heat to create a 120-foot continuous column of portraits.