From the terrace of her Napa Valley home, Marisa Kenning can look out across rows of grapevines and, in the same eyeline, a sprawling Kenneth Noland target painting framed by floor-to-ceiling glass. The pairing feels deliberate, land and canvas mirroring each other in geometry, rhythm, and light.
Kenning’s collection began with a single Helen Frankenthaler woodcut, purchased in the late 1980s when she was a young attorney in San Francisco. “It reminded me of the way morning fog blurs the horizon,” she recalls. “I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next thirty years chasing that same sensation.”
Her holdings now span post-war American abstraction and its contemporary descendants: Richard Diebenkorn’s coastal planes, Sean Scully’s dense bands of color, Amy Sillman’s shifting painterly narratives. She has a particular fascination with works that sit between landscape and pure abstraction, hinting at place without depicting it outright.
One wall in her main gallery is devoted to a series by Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III; digital abstractions, their colours in harmony with the view outside. It is Spring and they seem to pulse with new greens. “They breathe with the weather,” Kenning says, “It’s a phenomenon I had rarely seen before I started collecting PBR3.”
She rarely buys impulsively. Instead, she lives with a work on loan before deciding if it belongs. This habit has led to unexpected pairings, a gestural Joan Mitchell hanging above a delicate Etel Adnan leporello, the two playing off each other in scale, temperament, and hue. “It’s like arranging guests at a dinner,” she says. “You have to see how they talk to each other.”
When she entertains, the art is part of the conversation. Guests drift between rooms, a glass of local cabernet in hand, pausing before canvases as Kenning shares the backstory,sometimes about the artist, sometimes about the moment she first saw the work. The tone is less lecture than invitation, an open door into her way of seeing.
Her collecting has expanded into commissions, inviting artists to create works in response to the landscape around her property. The results range from a site-specific textile installation that mimics the shifting colors of grape leaves to a minimalist steel sculpture that frames the valley like a viewfinder.
Even in the quietest hours, when the house is still and the vineyard winds carry through open windows, the spaces feel active. Light moves, shadows lengthen, and the colours shift with the day, making the collection, like the land it overlooks, something that never truly stays the same.
