Is Aspen changing the way we think about art?

Ten years ago, the patron and film producer Sarah Arison purchased a home in Aspen with winter recreation in mind. ‘Everybody who lived there said, “you think you’re buying a ski house, but you’re actually buying a summer house,”’ says the collector, who serves as president of the board of trustees at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, chair of the board of YoungArts and president of Arison Arts Foundation. After her first Aspen summer, Arison came to the same conclusion: ‘As great as winter is, the amount of things to do during the summer is unreal.’

While Aspen is famous for being one of North America’s premier skiing destinations, in the warmer months, art and culture enthusiasts from around the world flock to the city’s vast offerings.

On 1 August for the second year in a row, Arison will co-chair ArtCrush, the Aspen Art Museum’s largest annual fundraising gala, which has become one of the art world’s buzziest events since it began 20 years ago. Entrepreneurs and fellow patrons Jen Rubio and Charlie Pohlad will co-chair the event honouring the artist Glenn Ligon with the 2025 Lewis Family Art Award. With Christie’s as ArtCrush’s Auction House Partner, the evening will feature a live charity auction conducted by Adrien Meyer, Christie’s Global Head of Private Sales and Co-Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art.

Since becoming the Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO of the Aspen Art Museum in 2020, Nicola Lees has aspired to create an interdisciplinary program that would convene the many great minds and influential leaders that the city has long attracted. This summer Lees will see her dream come to fruition with the launch of Art in Relation, or AIR. The ten-year initiative will entail year-round programming dedicated to commissions and artistic research to address the challenges of our time and an uncertain future. AIR will culminate in an annual private retreat and public festival, with this summer’s inaugural edition taking place from 29 July - 1 August.

‘The demands of the current moment — cultural, political, technological — require multidisciplinary thinking and approaches, a way of moving through the world that artists are especially equipped for,’ says Lees. ‘This festival is not your typical museum programming — AIR emerged from asking ourselves what a contemporary museum can be.’ Lees curated AIR 2025 alongside Vic Brooks, Daniel Merritt, Claude Adjil, Stella Bottai, Anisa Jackson, Eliza Ryan and Simone Krug.

Titled Life As No One Knows It, after the theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker’s 2024 book of the same name, this year’s AIR focusses on the intersection of art and technology. Walker will join a plethora of visionaries across disciplines for three days of conversations, performances and site-specific artworks. In addition to the renowned artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney, who is headlining the festival, featured talents include artists Paul Chan, Ligon and Maya Lin; architects Francis Kéré and Frida Escobedo; institutional leaders Thelma Golden and Courtney J. Martin and the Grammy Award-winning musician André 3000, amongst others.

Thinking differently at high altitudes

For Lees, AIR is an opportunity to expand upon Aspen’s longstanding role as a hotbed for thought leadership: ‘So many of the greatest thinkers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries — including Buckminster Fuller, Billie Holiday, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Sontag, Gaetano Pesce and Steve Jobs — have converged in Aspen since the late 1940s. The ripple effect of those encounters and conversations, many of which took place during the annual International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), is evident throughout the city and continues to inspire our work.’

Of the numerous fascinating IDCA lectures that occurred between 1951 and 2006, Jobs’s 1983 talk on a then-nascent Apple is arguably the most iconic. (AIR keynote speaker Maya Lin also spoke at the 1983 IDCA.) At just 28, Jobs charismatically laid out his vision for meaningful product design, while also alluding to future technology such as smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence and more. ‘We have a chance to make these [computers] beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves’, said Jobs.

AIR curator at large Vic Brooks says the organisers of Life As No One Knows It are striving for a similar ‘dual mode of engagement’ at the festival: ‘We asked ourselves, “How do we explore both the intellectual and the sensory side?” It’s not just about talking; it’s also about thinking with artists and the sensory capacity of art to allow us to feel meaning.’

Aspen has a storied history of linking art and intellectualism. In 1945 Walter Paepcke, the Chicago businessman who founded Container Corporation of America, came to Aspen for a ski trip and was inspired to transform the area into a destination for recreation and culture. Over the next 15 years, he helped turn the town of 600 into a thriving commercial and creative hub. Paepcke was a collector of modern art who had previously hired Willem de Kooning and Man Ray for his company’s advertising campaigns and was passionate about collaborating with artists across a range of disciplines.

Paepcke brought major architects such as Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen to Aspen to enliven the city with modern architecture. He also oversaw a multitude of ambitious initiatives, including the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival (which later split into the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and Aspen Institute of Music); the First Photographic Conference in 1951, which Ansel Adams called ‘about the best thing that has happened to photography’; and the First Aspen Conference on Design (later the IDCA), which prompted a 1957 attendee to say, ‘At the beginning I thought of this as a design conference. I now think of it as a conference about American civilisation participated in by designers.’

Paepcke and his successors also established art institutions and residencies, which brought world-class works and artists like Larry Poons, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Morris to Aspen. Groundbreaking curation has long been a cornerstone of the Aspen scene. During the early 1980s the Aspen Center for the Visual Arts (renamed the Aspen Art Museum in 1984), then in its third year, presented Castelli and His Artists. The exhibition spotlighted works by Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel and more artists championed by the powerhouse gallerist. Travelling to four venues — this show helped put Aspen on the international art-world radar.

‘When you’re in Aspen, you feel that you’re in a place where ideas can percolate and things can happen that couldn’t happen anywhere else,’ says Brooks. Today, the Aspen Institute, Anderson Ranch and the week-long Aspen Ideas Festival (whose recent speakers included artist Sanford Biggers, actor Sean Penn and architect Annabelle Seldorf) are just some of the venues bringing the world’s best minds to Aspen for game-changing discourse. The city also endeavours to engage the next generation of thinkers with initiatives like the Aspen Art Museum’s Youth Art Expo.

AIR 2025’s partners include Aspen mainstays like the Aspen Institute Arts Program, Anderson Ranch, and Aspen Music Festival, as well as organisations around the world including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Serpentine Galleries and many more.

The Aspen ethos: mind, body, spirit

The key to understanding why innovation and creative exchange are at the heart of Aspen may begin with its geography. ‘Aspen is not easy to get to, and the people that self-select to come here all share a certain ethos,’ says Arison, noting that nevertheless, the greatest collectors and board members from the nation’s top institutions opt to make the artistic pilgrimage each year. Arison describes the Aspen ‘ethos’ as ‘people who value relationships, creativity and presence.’ She continues, ‘You can go on a hike with somebody and get three hours with them where you don’t have cell phone service. You get a real chance to connect.’

It seems with Aspen, there’s just something in the air. ‘People think differently at high altitudes, and when they’re surrounded by mountains and forests and quiet,’ says Lees.

For Christie’s Deputy Chairman Capera Ryan, who has led the auction house’s Aspen initiatives for over 20 years, seeing the city grow into a ‘serious art capital’ where cultural groups ‘cross-pollinate’ has been inspiring. She, Arison and Brooks all believe Lees is taking things to the next level. ‘It’s not just about curating art; Nicola is curating a moment in which interesting people, scholars, scientists, musicians and artists are coming together,’ says Ryan.

Arison particularly admires how AIR ‘positions artists as leaders in society’: ‘At their core, artists are leaders,’ she says, citing artists like Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Lauren Halsey and Titus Kaphar, who have started their own philanthropic arts organisations. ‘I love how AIR stands for ‘‘art in relation.’’ It’s pushing the concept that art does not exist in isolation. It’s part of everything we do and everywhere we go.’