Aspen Art Museum

Aspen Art Museum The Aspen Art Museum is a non-collecting institution presenting contemporary art. Free Entry Tue-Sun

The Aspen Art Museum is a non-collecting institution presenting the newest, most important evolutions in international contemporary art. Our innovative and timely exhibitions, education and public programs, immersive activities, and community happenings actively engage audiences in thought-provoking experiences of art, culture, and society.

On our rooftop sit four new site-specific benches in dialogue with elements of the natural world, created by Kerstin Brä...
09/02/2026

On our rooftop sit four new site-specific benches in dialogue with elements of the natural world, created by Kerstin Brätsch. These functional artworks were generated through the artist’s long-standing engagement with traditional craft practices.

Brätsch’s ongoing series of mosaic benches builds upon the artist’s Fossil Psychics (Stucco Marmo) works, in which painterly gestures become bodies of fossilized fragments, as though they are remnants of geological phenomena or ancient creatures.

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Installation view of Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Palladiana, Mosaico_Bench III) at the Aspen Art Museum, 2026. Photo: Paul Salveson

Now on Art & Ideas: “Another Hit,” a new essay by Chief Curator Daniel Merritt on Matthew Barney’s ZONE DEFENSE: Old Sno...
08/27/2026

Now on Art & Ideas: “Another Hit,” a new essay by Chief Curator Daniel Merritt on Matthew Barney’s ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, the new large-scale sculpture commissioned and presented as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape.

Merritt traces the sculpture’s origins in Barney’s AIR 2025 performance, TACTICAL parallax, and considers how both works draw together the spatial logic of athletic play and parallax with mythologies of the American West. Centering on the violent 1978 collision between NFL players Darryl Stingley and Jack Tatum, the essay examines the systems of violence, power, and historical memory embedded within these enduring American narratives.

Read “Another Hit” at the link in bio.

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Images: Matthew Barney, ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, 2026. Cast aluminum, bronze, and stainless steel, rolled stainless steel, stainless steel chain, paint. Photo: Lance Ge**er. © Matthew Barney

Throughout the late 1980s, Arch Connelly worked weekend brunch shifts as a chef at Everybody’s, an East Village café, kn...
08/25/2026

Throughout the late 1980s, Arch Connelly worked weekend brunch shifts as a chef at Everybody’s, an East Village café, known for its lively communal atmosphere. At the end of each shift, he collected the eggshells left over from the kitchen and carried them back to his studio, where they became one of the defining materials of his artistic practice.

Eggshells appear throughout Connelly’s work in subtle accumulations, scattered across frames and dispersed over surfaces, but their most concentrated presence emerges in a series of geometric wall works where they overtake the picture plane entirely, coating the canvas in a second skin.

Reduced to the natural white of the shell against black or cream backgrounds, these compositions are precise in form and charged in symbolic value, conjuring the fragility of life’s early stages, the shattering of protections and the potential for new life.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is on view through October 11, 2026. Visit the link in bio to learn more and plan your visit 🔗

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Installation Views: Arch Connelly, Straighten Your Wig and Pray, Aspen Art Museum, 2026. Photos: Paul Salveson.

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is made possible by generous support from Maison Valentino.

Now on view: Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals Villar Rojas’ new exhibition is grounded in this premise: as ...
08/20/2026

Now on view: Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals

Villar Rojas’ new exhibition is grounded in this premise: as finite intelligences, humans confront a universe whose complexity exceeds our cognitive scale. In response, we build symbolic tools, gods, art, mathematics, as adaptive technologies to render the world navigable.
Across two floors of the Museum, the exhibition traces this lineage forward, from mythology as an early interpretive scaffold to artificial intelligence as its newest threshold. First Gods, Lost Animals is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator-at-Large.

Learn more and plan your visit at the link in bio.
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Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, 2026. Installation view, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA, 2026 . Photo by Jörg Baumann. Courtesy the artist, Aspen Art Museum, kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Johnson Atelier is the Commissioning Partner of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals.

Presenting a new sculpture co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum, Audemars Piguet, and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.

08/19/2026

Meet Arch Connelly, in his own words.

Art in Drag — a new short film by Lisa Rovner, commissioned to accompany the first major survey of the late artist’s work — offers a rare encounter with Connelly through a body of audio and video archival materials recently re-emerged, many preserved in the Visual AIDS Archive.

Speaking with striking candour, Connelly reflects on his artistic philosophy, his fascination with beauty and ornament, his years in San Francisco’s experimental theatre scene, and the creative communities that surrounded him.

Watch now at the link in bio.

With thanks to Roberto Juarez, Kyle Croft, David Hirsh and the Visual AIDS Archive, New York; as well as all the lenders who shared their archives.

Lisa Rovner is an award-winning French-American filmmaker and artist whose practice operates at the nexus of cinematic form, epistemological archaeology, and feminist historiography. Her critically acclaimed debut feature ‘Sisters with Transistors’ (2021) unearths the women who pioneered electronic music.

Adrián Villar Rojas speaks with Alfonso Cuarón for Interview Magazine, sharing a lively conversation about the popularit...
08/14/2026

Adrián Villar Rojas speaks with Alfonso Cuarón for Interview Magazine, sharing a lively conversation about the popularity of apocalyptic thinking, transience vs. permanence in various artforms, and evolution.

Read the full dialogue in Interview, link in bio 🔗

Adrián Villar Rojas’ exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals is on view at Aspen Art Museum until April 11, 2027.

Images: [1] Adrián Villar Rojas, photo: Jörg Baumann. [2] Planetarium, 2015. Installation view at the 12th Sharjah Biennial, Kalba, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Jörg Baumann. Courtesy the artist.

At AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Kali Malone presented an early morning organ concert on Aspen Chapel’s newly restor...
08/07/2026

At AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Kali Malone presented an early morning organ concert on Aspen Chapel’s newly restored pipe organ.

The program featured the U.S. premiere of Concentric Circles of the Choirs of Angels, commissioned by the Vatican in honor of Hildegard von Bingen for the 2026 Venice Biennale, alongside selected works from Malone’s repertoire, including compositions from The Sacrificial Code (2019) and All Life Long (2024).

The performance was preceded by readings from poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis, whose voices unfolded within the chapel’s high-alpine morning light.
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Kali Malone, Paige Lewis, and Kaveh Akbar. Photos: Elyse Mertz. Courtesy the artists and Aspen Art Museum

Some of the faces of ArtCrush 2026, snapped by Charlie Rubin. Thank you to everyone who joined us and supported the Muse...
08/04/2026

Some of the faces of ArtCrush 2026, snapped by Charlie Rubin. Thank you to everyone who joined us and supported the Museum—you make our programs throughout the year possible.

On July 30, Camille Henrot’s Commedia dell’arte had its world premiere at the Wheeler Opera House as part of AIR 2026: F...
08/03/2026

On July 30, Camille Henrot’s Commedia dell’arte had its world premiere at the Wheeler Opera House as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation, Henrot’s performance incorporates the stock characters and comic ploys of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building. The delivery of a package triggers a cascade of uncanny events among tenants, as the tragi-comedic play attempts to make sense out of the senseless, ultimately collapsing into it.

Commedia dell’arte is directed by Camille Henrot, with a script by Camille Henrot, Estelle Hoy, and Justine Gelfman, and original music composed and performed by Mauro Hertig and Aaron David Ross. It features set design by Adam Charlap Hyman of Charlap Hyman & Herrero in collaboration with Camille Henrot, choreography and rehearsal direction by Sigrid Lauren, costume design by Sandra Berrebi, and lighting design by Dan Stearns. The work is performed by Samori Etienne, Maya Margarita, Christina Catherine Martinez, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Isa Spector, and Alex Tatarsky. It is curated by RoseLee Goldberg, founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa and Eliza Ryan, Curator-at-Large, Aspen Art Museum, produced by Eliza Ryan and Julia Simpson with Dria Brown, technical direction by Ryan Jenkins and Theresa Tomi Faison, and stage management by Philip Trevino along with many others...

LYRA Art Foundation acts as a catalyst to fund curatorial projects and productions, supporting artists to realize ambitious works and drive cultural change.

Support for this performance is generously provided by the Arison Arts Foundation.

Presented as part of The Tisch Discovery Series, made possible through a generous gift from Steve Tisch and Jamie Tisch.

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IMAGES: Camille Henrot, Commedia dell’arte, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. Co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation. Photo: Maria Baranova. © ADAGP Camille Henrot, courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum

More snaps from Friday’s ArtCrush celebration.Thank you to everyone who joined us. We were proud to honor Adrián Villar ...
08/02/2026

More snaps from Friday’s ArtCrush celebration.

Thank you to everyone who joined us. We were proud to honor Adrián Villar Rojas, recipient of this year’s Lewis Family Art Award, whose exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals is open at the Museum through April 11, 2027.

Our deepest thanks to gala co-chairs Sarah Arison and Charlie Pohlad; auction advisors Bernard Lagrange and Mary Zlot; our live auction partner, Christie’s; and Sarah Broughton, who organized this year’s Wunderkammer design section. We’re especially grateful to the artists and galleries whose extraordinary contributions made the auction possible—and to everyone who placed a bid in support of the Museum’s programs.

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Photos: Jason Sean Weiss & ZachHilty/BFA.com

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637 E Hyman Avenue
Aspen, CO
81611

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Friday 10am - 6pm
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