Must-See Art and Design During Aspen Art Week

Aspen Art Museum

The Aspen Art Museum has accumulated 60 works from such coveted emerging artists as Robert Nava and Danielle Orchard and established designers as Ingrid Donat and Gaetano Pesce for its online auction and celebrated creatives like Peter Halley and the Haas Brothers for its live public sale. The Aspen Award for Art 2023 Honoree is the Berlin-based, Armenian-Iranian artist Nairy Baghramian, who has a dynamic solo show of her sculptures and photographs in the museum’s main galleries, while edgy German figurative painter Florian Krewer is having his first institutional solo show, which is spread across some of the museum’s equally generous gallery spaces.

The colorful Indigenous American artist Jeffrey Gibson, who was recently selected to represent the United States in the 2024 Venice Biennale, has an installation of sculptural heads made from stones and patterned flags that were used in a performance on the museum’s rooftop gallery and a series of found-object-crafted heads on the floor below. Besides the gala, some of the museum’s top Aspen ArtWeek events include visits to major collectors’ homes, in partnership with Intersect Aspen, and an invitation-only Ice Cream Social for Poncili Creación’s puppet performance, co-sponsored by Frieze.

Galleries and Pop-Ups

The seasonal haunt for some of the best art collectors in America, Aspen has a small but impressive selection of art and design galleries and summer pop-ups that offer all forms of aesthetic collectibles. Baldwin Gallery, which was founded in 1994 and continues to be the town’s top art gallery, has solo shows of dreamlike landscape and still life paintings by Inka Essenhigh and colorful phantasmagoric sculptures by Mathew Ronay. A three-minute walk away, Hexton Gallery, which set up shop in Aspen in 2018, is presenting a solo show of new lightworks and drawings by celebrated sculptor and installation artist Philip K. Smith III, who continues to keep the minimalist spirit of the California Light and Space movement alive.

After opening a permanent Aspen location in 2017, Marianne Boesky Gallery switched to the pop-up mode in 2021 and is back with a series of group exhibitions in a temporary space this summer. The current presentation features quirky glass and bronze sculptures by the Haas Brothers, abstract atmospheric photographs by Sarah Meyohas and psychological paintings of contorted figures by Celeste Rapone. A former partner in Aspen pop-ups over the past two years, Carpenters Workshop Gallery has teamed up with Calodney Art Advisory this summer to offer its adventurous design objects, including Maarten Baas and Atelier Van Lieshout, paired with paintings and works on paper by such well-known artists as Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama, in an exhibition about repetition of form and practice.

In another pairing of aesthetic visions, R & Company has joined Pitkin Projects for a pop-up shop featuring more than 100 artists and designers from the two galleries’ rosters. Showcasing new and recent designer furniture, lighting, rugs, jewelry, kitchen accessories and tabletop objects by Roberto Lugo, Nancy Lorenz and Dirk Van Der Kooij, amongst others, Pitkin Projects + R & Company offers one-stop shopping for nearly all of Aspen’s redecorating needs.

Intersect Aspen

Returning to the Aspen Ice Garden for its third edition with 31 international exhibitors, four special projects and a variety of professional programming, Intersect Aspen brings a broad selection of modern and contemporary art and design to esteemed local collectors and visiting buyers. New York’s Miles McEnery Gallery mixes geometric abstractions by Beverly Fishman, Markus Linnenbrink and Patrick Wilson with representational landscapes by Whitney Bedford and Isca Greenfield-Sanders.

Los Angeles’ Rusha & Co highlights Hannah Lupton Reinhard’s shimmering canvases of the artist and her friends that reference her Jewish upbringing in its group presentation, while New York and Southampton’s Todd Merrill Studio offers fiber art pieces by Erik Speer and Gerri Spilka and decorative ceramic and metalworks by Alice Riehl and Sophie Coryndon, respectively. And last but not least, Zurich and New York-based Galerie Gmurzynska features an inner gallery focused on plant paintings and reliefs by sixties female pop artist Majorie Strider, alongside modern and contemporary works by Alexej von Jawlensky, Robert Delaunay and Louise Nevelson.

Anderson Ranch

The popular Summer Series of artist lectures at Anderson Ranch has already featured talks by Christian Marclay and Mickalene Thomas, but there’s still one more conversation between artist Julia Phillips, who makes abstract drawings and psychological body sculptures, and critic and curator Douglas Fogle. There’s also an upcoming Guest Faculty lecture by Deborah Willis, a professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University and director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture, and other talks by visiting artists throughout August. Meanwhile, there’s an outdoor sculpture show that includes works by Isamu Noguchi, Sanford Biggers and Nari Ward and a ceramic exhibition, organized by Aspen artist and curator Sam Harvey, in the Ranch’s gallery.