Art & Design Donum Estate’s sculpture garden and a new Frieze fair warms to LA’s art scene.
a few years after Allan Warburg and his
IN 2014, wife Mei bought the Sonoma vineyards that had long yielded one of their favorite Pinot Noirs, they made an unusual agricultural decision. “We decided to plant sculptures!” says Allan, the billionaire cofounder of the Beijing-based retail conglomerate Bestseller. Today, Donum Estate, an hour’s drive from San Francisco, has a stillevolving collection of 40 monumental artworks by some of the world’s most recognizable artists on view in the sprawling vineyards. The art is accessible to visitors who book wine tastings—a self-guided tour takes an hour or two—and, come spring, Donum will offer weekly art tours.
A colossal heart in polished, mirrored steel by the British artist Richard Hudson serves as a beacon as one approaches the estate. Connoisseurs of Donum’s wines will quickly recognize artist Ai Weiwei’s circular installation Zodiac Heads— his monkey, horse, and ram adorn bottle labels of
the past three years, with the 2018 Year of the
Dog next up. An iconic Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture (the only artwork at the winery with its own pavilion) is steps from another classic: one of Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dot pumpkins. The most interactive piece is a walkable, gridded maze of shiny, brass-coated rods by Gao Weigang. Also dotting the landscape are a haunting vintage warplane by Anselm Kiefer, a hollow globe composed of Arabic words associated with love by Ghada Amer, and works by Keith Haring, Tracey Emin, Danh Vo, Jeppe Hein, Subodh Gupta, and Marc Quinn, to name a few.
“We’ve tried to make this a global collection,” Warburg says, noting the international nature of his family; he’s a scion of a prominent Danish family whose Chinese-born wife spent years in Australia. “We love different cultures.”
The beauty of the estate inspired the couple to turn Donum into an art destination. Rows of fat purple grapes make long brushstrokes across the gently rolling land, now often revealing several sculptures at once along the horizon.
The place touches every sense. There are thousands of fragrant lavender bushes, one of Mei’s projects on the site. Beside a reed-rimmed pond, birdsong fills the clear, dry air, and a small open-walled structure provides shelter from the strong Sonoma sun. On Donum’s organic farm, clucking chickens, bleating sheep, and two braying donkeys, Bonnie and Clyde, drown out the buzz of the beehives nearby.
Amid a eucalyptus grove, Los Angeles–based artist Doug Aitken’s Chime, a sound sculpture produced with composer Terry Riley, was slated to be installed in January. Aitken’s piece presages where Donum is heading: more work to be created with the estate in mind. “The inspiration we got out of working with Doug was going forward we would focus more on site-specific commissions, instead of looking out for pieces we think fit into Donum,” Warburg says. “We hope that Donum can become a place where artists from everywhere can express themselves.”
Laura van Straaten
“We’ve tried to make this a global
collection.”
—Allan Warburg