The strangest, most impressive outdoor sculptures in the Bay for 2025

On a coastal spit of land in Contra Costa County, there is a pair of immense cat sculptures. Who put them there, and why? Are they evidence of an ancient cat-worshiping civilization? If you hold your head close, might you hear them whispering: “I want chicken, I want liver / MeowMix, MeowMix / Please deliver”?

One thing’s for certain: These aren’t the only impressive and unusual sculptures you’ll find lurking outdoors in the Bay Area. From shambling driftwood creatures on the Albany Bulb – a former garbage dump colonized by nomadic artists – to monoliths and bronze horses in Santa Clara and a Sonoma vineyard decked out like the Louvre, art lovers will have no trouble discovering eyebrow-raising things. In no particular order, here are five excellent places to visit for al fresco art.

Point San Pablo Harbor, Richmond

If there ever was a home for retired Burning Man sculptures, it’s on this tiny peninsula stretching out into the Bay. Roughly half-a-dozen large-scale artworks rest here, quietly aging in the blazing sun and salt air and delighting people of all ages with their whimsical gimmicks.

The arts nonprofit We Are From Dust “rescued” these sculptures after their time on the playa from warehouses and storage rooms around the country. Prominent among them are Paige Tashner’s “Purr Pods,” two metal cats that can be sat upon and at one point actually purred – well, pleasantly vibrated — when you touched certain body parts. (Like many of the aging artworks here, it’s not 100 percent certain how well they still function interactively; some do light up at night, though.)

There’s also a 42-foot-long crocodile named “Niloticus” from artist Peter Hazel, jaws agape and covered in a rainbow armor of ceramic mosaics. The croc has a kaiju-esque friend in “Bee or Not to Bee,” a 12-foot-tall honeybee by artists Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson that’s perched on a flower made from 33,000 toy marbles. Add in a three-story Victrola phonograph paying tribute to the invention of recorded music, and an alien and womblike “Asterpod” you can gestate inside, and you got yourself a homegrown Burning Man experience – no mood-altering substances required.

Details: Open daily at 1900 Stenmark Drive, Richmond; live music and event calendar at pspharbor.com

Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, Stanford

Tucked into Stanford University is a startling menagerie of wildly painted totems, bug-eyed faces squished in stone and a crocodile-eagle hybrid in flight.

The roughly two-dozen creations form the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, which display traditional culture and creation myths from the Pacific island nation. Anthropology grad student James Mason built it in the 1990s with visiting artists from the country’s Sepik River region, who carved wood and shaped pumice into fantastical sculptures that lure art appreciators and students looking for a spot to chill out.

Tree trunks used in the sculptures were painstakingly transported in 40-foot chunks from Papua New Guinea. There’s a friendly dig directed at Auguste Rodin, whose B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden sits a short distance away. When visiting sculptor Teddy Balangu saw photos of it, he declared, “We can do better than that.” The artists then created two sculptures with names identical to ones in the Rodin encampment, called “The Thinker” and “The Gates of Hell.”

According to a plaque in the garden, “’The Thinker’ tells the story of an ancestor sitting by the hole from which he emerged into the world, thinking about how he might create fellow humans out of clay,” says Stanford writer Tracie White. “His first attempt has just failed, and the broken body parts lay scattered around his feet. The tale harkens back to the (native) creation legend. ‘Ours has a deep story behind it, unlike the one you did.’”

Details: Corner of Santa Teresa St. and Lomita Drive, Stanford; web.stanford.edu/~siegelr/stanford/pngsculpture.html.

Albany Bulb

The Bulb is the Bay Area’s most colorful garbage dump. Like much of the local coastline, it was filled in with construction debris (and just a slight amount of radioactive material). In the 1990s, the tiny peninsula was colonized by a nomadic artist population that reportedly arrived on boats, installing strange paintings, driftwood sculptures and even a ramshackle “castle” of spray-painted concrete with a functioning spiral staircase.

The art “collection” is constantly evolving, disintegrating, being vandalized or reclaimed by the water and sprouting up again anew. Today, visitors to the weed and wildflower-covered Bulb will find many startling creations coming out of the landscape.

A dragon made from wood scraps and rusty rebar, reaching out with fierce claws and bloody teeth, is like the Lizard King of the island, with vassals – real lizards who call the dump home – scurrying around at its feet. There’s an archway of old propane tanks perfect for a post-apocalyptic wedding shoot. Activist Osha Neumann made one of the most iconic sculptures here, sometimes called the “Beseeching Woman.” A giantess of driftwood, crumpled car metal and feathers, she reaches from the shoreline in a plaintive gesture. You almost want to give her a hug, if you suppress the thoughts of tetanus.

Details: 1 Buchanan St., Albany; albanybulb.org.

The Donum Estate, Sonoma

When the world-class museums crumble and are retaken by nature, you might get something like the Donum Estate. Located on a 200-acre-plus property in the Carneros wine-growing region, the estate offers award-winning Pinot Noir and Chardonnay – and then the chance to admire more than 60 monumental sculptures, created by renowned artists across six continents.

Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin and Robert Indiana are all included in the private collection of owners Mei and Allan Warburg, which visitors can tour in wine-tasting packages starting at $100. Some sculptures are site-specific and blend weirdly into the land: a polka-dotted pumpkin from Yayoi Kusama, or a black palm tree made from burned car tires, a commentary on the exploitation of rubber forests from Douglas White.

Others stalk the grapevines like visitors summoned from a fantastical dimension. Ai Weiwei has arranged a convocation of Zodiac animal heads, which seem to want to converse with a humongous elongated women’s head from Jaume Plensa. Seeing these apparitions resolving in the morning mist gives one the shivers. Meanwhile, a life-sized warplane made from lead and poppies, from German artist Anselm Kiefer, appears to have crash-landed in a field. Visitors can scan the horizon for the lost pilot in a colorful wine-tasting pavilion, recently designed by Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann.

Details: Open daily at 24500 Ramal Road, Sonoma; reserve your visit at thedonumestate.com/visiting.

Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara

What do horses and monoliths have in common? They’re both massive, sturdy and figure prominently at this contemporary Californian museum in Silicon Valley.

Now celebrating its 60th anniversary, Triton holds an impressive range of art inside its walls – including the city of Santa Clara’s art collection – and offers a nice fresh-air experience in its pleasantly landscaped garden. “The sculpture-garden collection is kind of a hodgepodge based on what we’ve collected over the years, going back to the 1940s and ’50s,” says museum curator Vanessa Callanta.

The founder of Triton was a local rancher who took a big interest in raising Morgan horses, an original American breed known for their good disposition and athleticism. So you’ll find sculptures like Sascha Schnittman’s 1966 “The Morgan Horse,” which looks as it sounds and at least once has been ridden by a naughty boy (please don’t do that). A not-so-naughty boy is the subject of the 1982 sculpture “The Cowboy,” depicting the founder’s grandson winning a ribbon for horse-related accomplishments.

Then there are things that’d fit right in at Stonehenge. Patricia Bengtson Jones’ 1990 piece “Symbol 1 R = Rune” is as cryptic as its title – a pillar of Italian marble etched with strange markings. “The marks represent stylized or abstracted runes or Nordic carvings,” says Callanta. “I really like that prehistoric quality.”

A male-female couple strides alongside wolves in a bronze Sharon Loper sculpture. “Her art’s really cool, because she goes into things that reflect a primal existence like our connection to the animal world,” Callantra says. And Thomas Walsh’s towering piece “Atreus” was inspired by ancient monoliths found in South and Central America. “His basic themes in art include the sacred, profane connections between life and death and transformation. So he’s really interested in the symbology of structures.”

Details: Open 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday (closed Mondays and holidays) at 1505 Warburton Ave., Santa Clara; free, tritonmuseum.org.

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