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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 July 29, 2026, Lyle Ashton Harris was joined by collaborators Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto for a newly commissi...
09/24/2026

On July 29, 2026, Lyle Ashton Harris was joined by collaborators Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto for a newly commissioned performance, On Oracle, on the Aspen Art Museum rooftop as part of AIR: Figures in a Landscape.

Now on Art & Ideas, Harris, Moore, and Pinto reflect on the making of the piece, a “performative montage” that juxtaposed the layered imagery of Harris’s Oracle (2020) with movement and spoken word.

Read more at the link in bio 🔗

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Images:
[1] Lyle Ashton Harris, On Oracle, 2026. Performance stills: Elyse Mertz
[2, 3, 4] Lyle Ashton Harris, On Oracle, 2026. Performance stills: Benjamin Rasmussen

In her review of Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray, Ksenia M. Soboleva marks the significance of this inaugura...
09/17/2026

In her review of Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray, Ksenia M. Soboleva marks the significance of this inaugural museum survey — presented more than three decades after Connelly’s AIDS-related death in 1993 — as an overdue retrospective of one of the East Village scene’s most distinctive voices.

Published in The Brooklyn Rail, Soboleva’s review traces Connelly’s journey from Chicago to New York, where he embedded himself in the downtown art world of the 1980s and built a body of “modern-day religious art” in faux pearls, eggshells, and glitter, self-described as “terrifically transient trash.”

Read the full review at the link in our bio 🔗

Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is on view through October 11, 2026.
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Image: Installation view: Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray, Aspen Art Museum, 2026. Courtesy Aspen Art Museum. Photo: Paul Salveson.

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

On July 28, 2026, Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks presented a film-performance of Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025) at T-Lazy-7...
09/16/2026

On July 28, 2026, Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks presented a film-performance of Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025) at T-Lazy-7 Ranch in Aspen as part of AIR: Figures in a Landscape. For the film’s first outdoor presentation, a monumental curved screen rose from the high alpine meadow for a single night, while Parks’s live score and prerecorded sound reverberated through the surrounding aspens.

In her essay Staging Murderers Bar, AIR’s Editor and Project Curator Mariana Fernández considers how the film-performance expanded beyond the screen into a physical event inseparable from the conditions of its performance. “Experienced beneath an open sky, the projected landscape takes on a new immediacy,” she writes. She situates its staging within a tradition of communal outdoor spectatorship, from drive-ins to ballpark screenings, alongside the fraught relationship between landscape and spectacle in the American West.

Read the essay at the link in our bio 🔗

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Images:
Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks, Murderers Bar, 2026. Performance still: Maria Baranova
Murderers Bar screen being constructed, 2026. All installation photos: Seth Beckton
Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks, Murderers Bar, 2026. Rehearsal still: Elyse Mertz

In his review of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Matt Moment observes how, in the sculpture, “patterns of...
09/14/2026

In his review of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Matt Moment observes how, in the sculpture, “patterns of dots, squares, webs, and honeycomb dent the rock, with grey checkerboards, like those that represent missing data in a computer rendering.” For Moment, this detail points to a unifying philosophy underlying the exhibition: “When we try to reconstruct the distant past, we cannot help but do so from the technological and metaphysical situation of the present. Nuances of the original are lost, obscured, or misunderstood, and in their place, we invent new possibilities.”

Published in The Brooklyn Rail, Moment’s review describes Villar Rojas’ interventions in the Museum, noting that his signature worldbuilding creates a microcosm of “atmospheric clarity.”

Read the full review at the link in our bio.

Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is on view through April 11, 2027.
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Image: Installation view: Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, 2026. Courtesy Aspen Art Museum. Photo: Jörg Baumann.

In his review of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Matt Moment observes how, in the sculpture, “patterns of...
09/14/2026

In his review of Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Matt Moment observes how, in the sculpture, “patterns of dots, squares, webs, and honeycomb dent the rock, with grey checkerboards, like those that represent missing data in a computer rendering.” For Moment, this detail points to a unifying philosophy underlying the exhibition: “When we try to reconstruct the distant past, we cannot help but do so from the technological and metaphysical situation of the present. Nuances of the original are lost, obscured, or misunderstood, and in their place, we invent new possibilities.”

Published in The Brooklyn Rail, Moment’s review describes Villar Rojas’ interventions in the Museum, noting that his signature worldbuilding creates a microcosm of “atmospheric clarity.”

Read the full review at the link in our bio.

Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is on view through April 11, 2027.

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Image: Installation view: Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, 2026. Courtesy Aspen Art Museum. Photo: Jörg Baumann.

Congratulations are in order to Kerstin Brätsch, who has been announced as the recipient of the 2027 Zurich Art Prize.Th...
09/10/2026

Congratulations are in order to Kerstin Brätsch, who has been announced as the recipient of the 2027 Zurich Art Prize.

The award celebrates Brätsch for creating works that actively structure space, serving to separate and connect simultaneously. Her site-specific commission opened on the Aspen Art Museum rooftop this summer, a series of four mosaic benches that welcome interaction and admiration, set against a new vinyl mural from Brätsch’s MƎTA series.

Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen) is on view until March 31, 2027. Learn more and plan your visit at the link in our bio.

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Images:
[1] Sebastian Hilgetag
[2] Installation view, Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen), Aspen Art Museum, 2026. Photo: Tony Prikryl

The costumes of Commedia dell’arte, Camille Henrot’s first work for the stage, captured at the Wheeler Opera House befor...
09/09/2026

The costumes of Commedia dell’arte, Camille Henrot’s first work for the stage, captured at the Wheeler Opera House before the world premiere during the Aspen Art Museum’s 2026 AIR festival.

Designed by Sandra Berrebi in collaboration with a talented team of fabricators, stylists, and brands, Commedia’s costumes blended the play’s 17th century inspiration with modern day archetypes. From Il Capitano’s cheeky “Soumis” briefs to Pantalone’s absurdly large trousers, each character’s wardrobe includes details that reward an engaged audience.

Costume fabrication by Sandra Berrebi, Rae Swon, Tony Peto, Alder Beghma, Soven, Véronique Boisel, Loucas Chabot, Branica Sanadrovic, Martha Grauer, Anna L’Hostis, Pénélope Diehl, and Mylo Coustures; costume and wardrobe production support by Dria Brown; wardrobe assistant and art handler Kayleigh Snowden; fashion stylist collaborator Myssia Ghosn, seamstress and costume assistance by Kate Williams and costume assistance by Zo Roze. Costume support from Atelier SOVEN, Crocs, Doc Martens, Duran Lantink, GCDS, Herno, Iconisme Paris, La Botte Gardiane, Le Monde Béryl, MAZARIN, On, Rohan Mirza, and Sheerly Touch-Ya.

Commedia dell’arte is co-commissioned by Performa, Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation. The play will begin its New York City run at L’Alliance New York’s Florence Gould Theater September 23–26, tickets now available.

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Images: Camille Henrot, Commedia dell’arte, 2026. Rehearsal 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: Lyndsy Welgos.
© ADAGP Camille Henrot, courtesy the artist.

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.

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637 E Hyman Avenue
Aspen, CO
81611

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Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 10am - 6pm
Sunday 10am - 6pm

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