Alice Warnecke
Alice Warnecke Sutro is an artist and grapegrower living in Healdsburg, CA. She received her MFA in 2010 from California College of the Arts in Painting and Drawing. She studied art intensively starting in high school, then obtained a BA from Stanford University in Art History. She has lived in Florence, Moscow and Berlin pursuing figure drawing and has worked at Cantor Center for the Arts, Tretyakov Gallery and Sonoma County Museum. After obtaining her MFA, she returned to Healdsburg to work for her family business Warnecke Ranch & Vineyard and help launch Chalk Hill Artist Residency. She also founded the wine label SUTRO in 2012. She is president of Alexander Valley Winegrowers Association and serves on the board of Chalk Hill Artist Residency. In 2019, she discovered the medium and format that now defines and drives her practice: performative, large-scale, public drawing. Statement: Alice Warnecke Sutro creates large-scale figurative drawing installations that depend on audience participation. She believes that art-making and ritual are the same and she puts that to practice in her performances. 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 and the act of connecting. Inspired by contemporary artists like Marina Abramovich and Matthew Barney, Alice designs her projects to explore the edge of her endurance. Past projects have included filling a 3-story façade with people by means of a scissor lift and extension paintbrushes, drawing visitors at an art fair for 2 days to create a 120-foot continuous column of portraits, and drawing 100 portraits in 24 hours over 3 day.
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.