AAM Summer 2024 Edition
ASPEN ART MUSEUM With: Shigeru Ban, Jacqueline Humphries, Allison Katz, Jason Moran and Audience Plant 2024
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
ASPEN ART MUSEUM With: Shigeru Ban, Jacqueline Humphries, Allison Katz, Jason Moran and Audience Plant 2024
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
ASPEN ART MUSEUM With: Shigeru Ban, Jacqueline Humphries, Allison Katz, Jason Moran and Audience Plant 2024
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
A proud member of the Aspen community for over 20 years and auction house partner for ASPEN ARTWEEK ARTCRUSH 2024 and
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This year marks 45 years since artists founded the Aspen Art Museum and ten years since we moved into our home on the corner of Hyman and Spring, designed by Shigeru Ban. Such happy anniversary moments mark time, giving opportunity to reect on how many hands, hearts and minds went into making this institution what it is today. Led fearlessly by the Board of Trustees and National Council, helmed by Co-Presidents Melony Lewis and Amnon Rodan, we have been able to forge new paths for the museum. Their enduring commitment to architects and artists takes physical form in our awe-inspiring building where art lives and breathes. To come to work here each day is a gift. All of this originates from the brain of architect Shigeru Ban, one of three recipients of this year’s Aspen Award for Art. With deep generosity, resourceful- ness and sensitivity to people and place, he has made an indispensable gathering spot for the Roaring Fork Valley community, distinguished by its porousness, exibility and devotion to art. Our anniversary exhibition, “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” is a re- minder of how beautifully this building showcases painting . Staged by Allison Katz and reaching every corner of the museum’s galleries across all three oors, the show brings together more than 100 works of art, incorporating pieces from personal collections in and around Aspen, bridging epochs and styles—from fragments of Pompeian wall paintings, to exemplary art from the 20th and 21st centuries, and paintings by Katz herself. It is a poignant reection on a medium’s ceaseless capacity for regeneration within the frame. Ban’s building, in Katz’s world, becomes another frame for painting. In celebration of the medium, we are also proud to honor artist Jacqueline Humphries with the Aspen Award for Art. Her pioneering work in abstract painting has reshaped the ways in which we contemplate cultural histories and modern communication techniques. The weightlessness of music counters these material explorations in paint within the museum’s artistic program. We are so excited to present three per- formances during Aspen ArtWeek that each take root in sonic explorations, starting with Aspen Award for Art recipient Jason Moran, who will perform a piano and vocal duet on the museum’s rooftop with his partner and longtime collaborator, Alicia Hall Moran. The following evening, on top of Aspen Mountain, Moran, a restless innova- tor who has transformed contemporary jazz, will feature as a guest in a collec- tive performance of new music by artist Ryan Trecartin, titled Audience Plant 2024 , which also features Lizzie Fitch, Ashland Mines and the students of the Aspen Music School. Trecartin transforms music made with digital software into live orchestrations, weaving unexpected sonic textures into an acoustic tapestry that pushes composition in new and surprising directions. Finally, on the morning of ArtCrush, we welcome visitors back to the museum roof terrace for a sound bath by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. The performance merges poetry and gong percussion and promises to transport the audience into new realms. This anniversary year, our ArtCrush auction, which has been curated by Abigail Ross Goodman and Molly Epstein, is exceptional. With their sharp eyes, the duo has brought together a winning combination of bright emerging and established artists in what remains the premier benet auction for an American institution. We are enormously proud to share proceeds of the sales with our donating artists, which is a practice that will remain a cornerstone of ArtCrush for years to come. Our new partner, Christie’s, has been essential to the realiza- tion of such a remarkable auction. I am deeply grateful for the support of the gala’s Co-Chairs, this year represented by four brilliant couples: Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm, Eleanore and Domenico De Sole, Jack Carter and Charlie Pohlad, and Jen Rubio and Stewart Buttereld. Aspen is deeply fortunate to receive such unparalleled enthusiasm from our community and our partners, which enables us to fulll our unique mission. It is essential that we work alongside artists as they venture into the unknown. To do this, we must continue to build trust and establish deep relationships that transcend the parameters of production timelines or rehearsal schedules. It is here, in Aspen, that we can provide a truly special environment in which relation- ships can flourish in the deliberate tempo of mountain time. In our work with artists at the museum, we revel in the incubation period of ideas, thinking together about the impossible. This is a special community and we celebrate not only our past but our shared futures.
About the Aspen Art Museum:
ArtCrush 2024 Gala Co-Chairs Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm Jen Rubio and Stewart Buttereld Charlie Pohlad and Jack Carter Eleanore and Domenico De Sole
Nicola Lees Nancy and Bob Magoon Director Aspen Art Museum
ArtCrush Magazine
Produced by Frieze Studios for the Aspen Art Museum
Francesca Girelli Caroline Marciniak Arianna Trabuio Sherie Sitauze Kristina McLean Erik Hesselman
Director of Branded Content & Studios Content Operations Manager
Matthew McLean Sara Harrison Chris Waywell Lauren Barrett Christopher Lacy
Editor Project Editor Senior Editor Art Director Designer
The AAM is grateful for the support of Bottega Veneta. Additional support provided by:
Creative Producer Assistant Producer Special thanks to
Christie’s, J.P. Morgan Private Bank, LALO Tequila, Lugano Diamonds and Steven Shane of Compass Real Estate.
Modern Art
GREENE NAFTALI
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CONTENTS
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8 HOUSE OF MIRRORS Emily LaBarge on the connections woven through “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” an exhibition staged at the museum by Allison Katz and organized in collaboration with the Archeological Park of Pompeii. 12 BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL The director of the California Film Commission, Colleen Bell, and artist and writer Aria Dean talk about their careers, what excites them in art, television and lm, and their shared love of Aspen. 17 CAFÉCULTURE Liz Lambert and Larry McGuire tell us what’s on the menu at Swedish Hill Aspen, the relaunched Aspen Art Museum café. 18 STRONGTIES The Aspen Art Museum’s dedication to supporting local artists is exemplied by the annual Artist Fellowship. Kealey Boyd talked to some of the practitioners across the Roaring Fork Valley who have beneted from this program.
20 HOME AND AWAY A glimpse into the Aspen home of collectors Jen Rubio and Stewart
34 SHIGERUBAN Architect Shigeru Ban, one of this year’s ArtCrush honorees, designed the building that the Aspen Art Museum calls home. Diana Budds takes a look at his Pritzker Prize-winning practice. 36 JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES For decades, Jacqueline Humphries, one of this year’s ArtCrush honorees, has been challenging the scope of painting. Michelle Grabner charts the evolution of the artist’s work. 38 JASONMORAN Musician and artist Jason Moran, one of this year’s ArtCrush honorees, will present two performances this summer during ArtWeek. Ian Bourland examines the work of this seasoned collaborator.
42 MEET THE ARTISTS Explore some of the artists generously donating works to the ArtCrush 2024 auction. 48 DESIGNMINDED Design Miami co-founder Craig Robins and his partner, Jackie So er, talk about the joys of collecting design and art. 52 SEEINGSTARS Terence Trouillot looks ahead to shows at the museum by three rising talents: Shuang Li, Jasper Marsalis and Heji Shin. 60 LENA HENKE MODELS AN AAM EXCLUSIVE Artist Lena Henke models the Stetson she designed exclusively for the Aspen Art Museum—one of a number of collaborations with our community of artists available in the museum shop.
Buttereld, who are among this year’s ArtCrush gala co-chairs. In an interview with Xerxes Cook, Rubio discusses the couple’s move to Colorado and their wide-ranging collection. 26 HIGHFREQUENCY For this year’s Aspen ArtWeek, Ryan Trecartin and a cast of fellow artists and musicians will take to the mountain top to stage a newly commissioned live performance, Audience Plant 2024 . Harry Tafoya traces the history of Trecartin’s collaborations. 28 CURRENTISSUES The curator of this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, legendary writer, journalist and editor Tina Brown, talks to Evan Mott about her eclectic and illustrious line up for the festival and her commitment to “live journalism.”
On each cover, from the top Shigeru Ban in Mitsukejima, Suzu, Ishikawa, 2024
Photography Hiroyuki Hirai
Jacqueline Humphries at her studio in Brooklyn, 2024
Photography Adrianna Glaviano
Jason Moran at his home in New York, 2024
Photography Adrianna Glaviano
An Abstraction Adam Pendleton
New York pacegallery.com
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Summer Exhibition
Allison Katz’s expansive “In the House of the Trembling Eye” assembles the artist’s dazzling paintings with those from private Aspen collections and special loans including fragments of frescoes from Pompeii. In a theatrical display at the Aspen Art Museum inspired by ancient domestic spaces, the exhibition presents Katz’s vision of painting as “a call and response, a question posed across time.”
HOUSE OF MIRRORS
the idea that painting is a conversation.” The show is titled “In the House of the Trembling Eye”—a poetic phrase that layers (palimpsests? collapses? explodes? melts down and fuses?) associations of the well-known remote mountain town and its trembling deciduous trees with a famous moun- tain and its well-preserved denizens on the other side of the world: the ancient site of Pompeii. Through nine rooms, the trembling eye roves and judders, saunters and alights, keeps looking and looking at painted surfaces of all colors and sizes, textures and ages, following Katz’s intricate web of red threads that stretch between works both ancient and modern, all of which hail from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii or from the private collections of the museum’s near neighbors. In her studio on a chilly Saturday morning in late April, Katz shows
The museum is an exhibition space, an ancient Pompeiian house (“ domus ”), an archaeological site, a contemporary resurrection, a series of mirrors and reections, a mise en abîme, a homage, a conversation, a continuum, a bounded area—with four sides, sometimes more—lled with paintings. This is, in fact, remarkably similar to making a painting and to painting in general: the question of how to organize space. At Aspen Art Museum, Allison Katz has curated (I use the term loosely, as she prefers to call the act a “staging”) a nuanced and astonishingly varied exhibition that oers deep, creatively generous and open-ended proposals about what it means, both in the past and the present, to construct an image. “Painting is for me always a question hollered across time and traditions, to see who and what answers,” Katz said in our recent discussion, “as if to test
Left Allison Katz, Trembling Eye II , 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth
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me her elaborate scale model of the exhibition, which enacts or stages—in a kind of “psycho-architecture”—the dierent spaces of the traditional Pompeiian home. “Stage” is a word that we both use often in the long and ow- ing conversation that follows, along with theater, mask, performance, iden- tity, intimacy, private, public—themes and realities familiar to any person from any time. But they are particularly relevant to the interior spaces of the domus , which were constructed to reect dierent purposes, customs, activities and power dynamics. Plus ça change , one might say—even in our era of open-plan layouts. But, for Katz, the organization of space also mirrors the questions and concerns of paint- ing: what do you do with/what happens inside/how does a body (or an eye) move around this space with its xed parameters? Does it embrace the real or the illusory, the plain or the deco- rated, the gurative or the abstract? Does it straddle all of the above to push against spatial and pictorial expecta- tions—break the walls down? I place my head close to the model and peer into each room as Katz vividly describes it: the street (from which you can see directly into the center of the house, where its patriarch sits elevated), atrium (courtyard), tablinum (oce), triclinium (dining room), peristyle (enclosed garden), cubicula (a personal favorite: curtained sleeping pods sometimes also used for meet- ings, trysts, murder or suicide), culina (kitchen). As the project started with Pompeii—where Katz visited as part of Pompeii Commitments, a program that hosts artists, curators and researchers on site—so does each room, only to quickly go elsewhere. (This, too, is how vision works, darting near to far, around and back, sometimes stopping to dream in the middle-distance.) The rooms are like stanzas in the poetic sense—they don’t illustrate or argue but gather thoughts and images to hang and jostle and rub together in tension and anity, producing a dierent experience for each witness. Looking closely, imagining walking from street to atrium to culina to cubiculum , I glimpse familiar works, some close to my heart: a Paul Thek trio of ames sinking into lapis waters; a pale Joan Mitchell triptych raucous at its center with dark green and eeting ames of crimson, yellow, magenta; an early Alice Neel drawing of the artist nude on the toilet while her similarly exposed lover urinates into a sink that seems to oat unmoored from the wall; an Ed Ruscha gas station silhouetted against a sky of glowing reds and oranges; Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s wallpaper in chalky pastels; a Cecilia Vicuña paint- ing of legs studded with breasts (or bulbous eyes?) oating against bright yellow and orange striations; a plaster leg, hip to foot, by Alina Szapocznikow. I could go on and on: in nite riches across many rooms. Amid these works and others that span primarily the 20th and 21st centuries (with one piece from the 17th) are scattered fragments of wall frescoes and objects from Pompeii (Narcissus and his reection, a group of men, a leering satyr, a cheetah chas- ing a fawn, a strangely geometrical stone thumb) and numerous paintings by Katz herself that deal with openings, frames, faces, authorship and enigma.
Left Allison Katz, Frequencies , 2024. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Eva Herzog
or “she who steps along,” “a woman who walks,” “the one who advances,” a Roman goddess who inspired the Surrealists and for Freud symbolized psychoanalysis as a cure for love. I think of her here as the visitor, the curator, the artist, the painter—con- soled by fragments and elated with combinatorial agility. She walks, keeps walking, through the domus , the gallery, the canvases and beyond.
it), enthusiastically broadcast. These devastations do not promise immacu- late preservation, as was the accidental eect of the eruption of Vesuvius, which froze everything—including 1,150 human bodies—precisely where it lay. “The Pompeiian fragments bring me consolation. Painting from 2,000 years ago that looks like it was made today. The fragment as a form in itself brings me consolation,” Katz says. The Pompeiian fragment is a form of painterly continuity and a reminder of what is at stake while we are alive because this time, after the eruption, there may be nothing left for any artist, curator or archaeologist to piece together. But here and now we have the canvas. The penultimate and nal rooms of “In the House of the Trembling Eye” escape the con nes of the domus into rooms titled “Eruption” and “Gradiva.” The former is hot and wild, teeming with reds (Anish Kapoor, Lucio Fontana), ying and smeared multicolored chaos (Julie Mehretu, Gerhard Richter), ominous ssures (Katz) and almost a dozen other eruptive images, both abstract and gurative. The latter is cool and spare, dominated by Katz’s large painting of a walking woman in silhouette, her form multiplied like a stop-motion kaleidoscope. She is Gradiva (2024),
My mind skips through Warburgian associations, linking images through pseudomorphism (a line here matches a curl there, hues echo across canvases, framing devices repeat and invert, animals and gures and faces leap and perform and sometimes look straight out at you), as if each room has some- how dreamed its contents, exhumed from somewhere between Aspen and Pompeii, between Katz’s studio and her staged domus interiors. Art-historical, painterly and thematic preoccupations would oer dierent routes through the house, which is also the gallery, as would a viewer’s own associations. As the artist avers, this is a show distinctly not about taste. “What does it mean to look for the continuum in painting, and to express, in an exhibition format, the inexhaustibility of the painted surface? To communicate across time, in a poetic logic, similar to Virginia Woolf’s de nition of poetry (‘a voice answering a voice’)?” Katz asks. The answer is a chorus. In 79 AD, the 20,000 inhabitants of Pompeii knew they were living on the edge of Mount Vesuvius, but they didn’t know it was a volcano, and that it would soon begin to tremble and destroy everything in its wake. Today, we live in a constant state of loom- ing catastrophe and impending doom (climate change, nuclear war, you name
Support cutting-edge programming and join an exciting community of art lovers by becoming a supporter of the Aspen Art Museum: aspenartmuseum. org/join
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London, UK. Her book Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. “In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz” runs until September 29. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Italy.
Hein Koh September 2024
Anton Kern Gallery 16 E 55th St, New York, NY 10022 Hein Koh, Amends (detail), 2024, Oil on canvas, 30 x 44 inches (76.2 x 111.8 cm)
New York | Brussels | Seoul
gladstonegallery.com
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Aspen is a place where extraordinary encounters happen. After her first visit to town, artist and filmmaker Aria Dean spoke with entertainment veteran and long-term resident Colleen Bell. The two share their multifaceted careers, diverse passions and future plans.
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Aspen Spirit
lms, but I’m taking great pride in all of the extraordinary content being created in lm and television here in California. It gets beamed all over the world and keeps Californians working, doing the jobs that they love to do. I think our country, unfortunately, is experiencing a moment of such deep polarization. But in a museum or movie theater, we’re all there experi- encing art and enjoying the opportunity to be together. AD On a personal level, my focus right now is on nding a way for art and lm to really exist together. For the last six, seven years, I’ve been making video work and sculpture largely in the context of the art world. Last year, I made a short lm that nally had a life both in the art world with exhibition formats and also on the festival circuit. I am interested in reaching a wider audience, and digging more into the language of lm. What it can do, what it can make people feel, is very exciting to me. But they’re not mutually exclu- sive industries, there’s a way to really straddle both and to make things that can live in both spaces. CB Film has the ability to provoke conversations about pressing issues such as poverty, war, racism and gender inequality. My cousin, Bradley McCallum, is a conceptual artist and social activist. He addresses trauma and struggle and racial identity. His work includes large public projects, sculpture, video and photography. I’m inspired by what he’s doing at this moment in time, mixing all of those disciplines together to address some really pressing issues. Incidentally, I went to the Ed Ruscha opening at LACMA last night, and it felt like such a powerful California experience. AD It’s funny, Ruscha is alive and well, of course, but I have a tendency to be very in©uenced by a lot of dead white men. My all-time favorite artist, although I cooled on it a bit, is Robert Morris, who passed away a few years ago. He was known for hard-edged minimalist sculptures, but through performance, video and lm he also really engaged with his own subjectivity as a white American man, inhabiting caricatures of the gangster, the cowboy, the intellectual. A lot of this work was happening during Vietnam and the anti-war and labor movements in New York City, and he was actively organiz- ing artists in relation to these through projects like Art Strike. I think he’s a reminder of how one can not only comment on or work through political stu in one’s work, but also be part of a community of people thinking about those things. A really early love of mine is Senga Nengudi. She has been a sculptor since the 1970s and raised interesting questions about making abstract work as a Black woman and about what it means to make art as a Black person in America. What are you supposed to be doing? Are you supposed to make gurative work? Is abstraction a tool that is interesting or useful? I’m also really in©uenced by a lot of maybe dry, experimental lm work from the 1960s and ’70s, like that of Michael Snow, who passed away last year. Stu that may seem very dull to watch but is riveting in some ways. Also Tiany Sia, a great artist and lmmaker who did a lot of work around the Hong Kong protests a few years ago, and is interested in the
ARIA DEAN I was born and raised in Pasadena, California. I grew up in a production family: My dad’s an assistant director, my mom’s a producer. All of their friends were in the industry and it was the height of the music-video era and MTV. I worked as a costume assistant when I was in college, but my parents really encouraged me to nd my own interests. I always did art stu. I painted, drew and wrote a lot as a kid and I ended up going to Oberlin College. I studied art and philosophy and just stumbled into the art world and went on to work in numerous places in my 20s. COLLEEN BELL I’ve been in Los Angeles for 32 years. I went to college in Virginia, with a spell at St. Andrews in Scotland. I was work- ing on Capitol Hill and I had traveled to various places in the world, but I had never been to California. Then I re-met my childhood sweetheart who was in LA launching a new soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful , and he proposed marriage right away. The show was just getting o the ground, so it was all hands on deck and, although it felt a little o my career trajectory, I went to work for the production company. So, I was producing and my husband was a head writer. This was the moment that the international markets were opening up, and we found that soon our little half-hour daytime drama was being seen in 110 countries around the world, with over 150 million viewers. The social activist in me thought, “Wow, what a platform to educate people, build social cohesion, and to promote peace and prosperity.” To give just one example, we had many viewers in Africa and it was when the AIDS epidemic was raging through the con- tinent. We would tell these long story trajectories, weaving in information about HIV prevention. When we had our fourth child, I decided to take a leave of absence and asked myself what had I always wanted to do but hadn’t had time to pursue, and that was to work on toxic chemical reform. The NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] was doing the best work in the nonprot space on this, and so I reached out to them and oered to volunteer. They sent me to Washing- ton, D.C., where I met Senator Barack Obama in the second month of his rst term. Then one thing led to another, which brought me back into government work. I was with the Obama adminis- tration and my nal position was as the US ambassador to Hungary. Now I work for the Newsom admin- istration, in the governor’s o§ce of business and economic development as the director of the lm commission. I am happy to be working somewhere where I feel like my values completely align. This is a state of dreamers, somewhere that doesn’t only recognize but celebrates our cultural and ethnic diversity as one of our great assets. I love being in California. AD Yes, lately I’ve been missing California more than ever, not just the sun but the California attitude, the way people interact. CB There is denitely a large community of creatives here. And some- thing I’m excited about at the moment is this even stronger belief that art and lm have the ability to build social cohe- sion, promote peace and unify people around the world. With my portfolio as lm commissioner, I’m not making the
Right, top to bottom Behind the scenes of The Bold and the Beautiful , 2007. Courtesy: Abaca Press/ Alamy Stock Photo Aria Dean, King of the Loop , 2020, installation view, Made in L.A. 2020: a version , Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2020. Courtesy: the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photograph: Joshua White / JWPictures. com ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN , 2024, installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2024, Museum Acquisition Fund, © Ed Ruscha, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA Active worksite of Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles , 1976. ©SPARC 1983. Judith F. Baca and the SPARC archives. Photograph: Linda Eber
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company, it was the rst time I realized the disparity and just how unstructured the art world is in terms of nancing and even contracts. The distribution and rights structures in each industry are also very dierent in a way that I nd fascinating. CB In the entertainment industry here in California, there’s a lot of policy and legislation that supports the growth of the community. Also, you have all of the labor unions that are advocating for the various groups. At LACMA, we’ve undergone a major new building project and capital campaign. We had set ourselves such an ambitious goal, and it has been really wonderful how many people from all dierent sectors have come out in support, recognizing that bricks and mortar still count and that people want a place where they can come together and have a shared experience. That, I think, bodes well for the future of institutions. AD I went to Aspen for the rst time a few months ago to give a talk about John Chamberlain at the Aspen Art Museum. I had no idea what to expect, but it was just so beautiful and calming. And the community there, especially at the museum, was equally nestling—so warm and welcoming. Very rarely when I give a talk some- where do I think, I want to go back there, but it was so amazing. What a cool place to have expansive conversa- tions! I feel like it’s the perfect place for that. CB We go way back with Aspen. My dad, who’s 84, still skis Aspen Mountain and hasn’t missed a season there since 1954. Aspen is my happy place. We have a house right on the river and with all those negative ions coming o, it’s the most relaxing place for me anywhere in the world. And, of course, I love the community. It’s international and the people living there, both full- and part-time, all come together to support music, lm, art and sporting events. You get everything you need in one small town and there’s never a dull moment.
histories that involve China, Hong Kong and activism. We’ve been talking to each other a lot lately about ways to look at history and incorporate specic and perhaps lesser-known moments into lmmaking in the art world. CB I’m inspired by Judy Baca—by her large murals, how she brings together members of the community to participate in the experience of making art, and her depictions of California. I also think the work of Louise Bourgeois is extraordinary. I was read- ing a book about her recently: she’d have to wait until her kids went to sleep at night to go into her studio and make her art. It’s something I can relate to, being a working mother of four kids. I write a lot, including a lot of speeches. When the kids were little, I would write at night: that’s when the house was quiet and I could make a cup of tea and get creative. They are older now, but those quiet, productive moments after very busy days are a nice memory. AD In television, I’m a religious watcher and rewatcher of the show 30 Rock , with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, which is maybe random, but I watched it as a kid and I watch it all the way through probably once, or maybe even twice, a year. I think it has some of the best writing in television, and most inventive narratives. It’s full of riddles. On the lm side, I’m really interested in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s career. His lms ask aesthetic and political questions about the history of popular and arthouse cinema and melodrama, and the way the state interacts with the media; he wraps all this in interest- ing, personal narratives. I also really love the Korean lmmaker Hong Sang- soo, whose lms are almost like little drawings of people hanging out. CB For me, Quentin Tarantino is an extraordinary lmmaker. He’s so pure in his approach and his characters are rich and complex. He’s going to be shooting his tenth and, he says, nal project, here in California. It’s in our lm and television tax credit program, which I administer. I think Greta Gerwig’s approach to lmmaking is so clever, creative and bold. Barbie was a marvel in so many ways. It really got people back into the theater. AD I nally saw her Little Women . I feel like there are few lms made today that I would call delightful, but that is one of them. I am curious to know more about the lm and television tax credits you mentioned. CB Well, there’s a lot of competi- tion out there for California—many places in the US and other countries that are trying to lure production away from here. So, we are always asking how we can improve our competitiveness, and one way is our lm and television tax credit program. One of the primary deciding factors for executives when choosing where to shoot is whether or not they’ll be able to receive tax credits. So, this is really an economic develop- ment tool to encourage productions to stay in California, which, of course, then translates into job sustainability and economic growth. AD I am interested in various tax credit structures, and I know very little about most of them. In the lm industry, people are making budgets and contracts and getting permits, while this is all so vague and unclear in the art world. When I was working in development at an artist’s lm
Right, top to bottom A woman looks at Louise Bourgeois’s Spider during a Christie’s New York press preview, 2019. Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images Still from 30 Rock , 2010. Courtesy: Collection Christophel/ Alamy Stock Photo Still from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lili Marleen , 1981. Courtesy: Photo 12/ Alamy Stock Photo Mountains in Aspen. Courtesy: Steve Boice/ Alamy Stock Photo
This conversation was moderated by Vic Brooks , a consultant for the Aspen Art Museum. She lives in Shady, New York . Colleen Bell is director of the California Film Commission. She lives in Los Angeles. Aria Dean is an artist and writer. She lives in New York.
Kathleen Ryan
Karma
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Food
the world-class programming and architecture. It deserves to have some- thing great upstairs that also serves the community. LL I was just there and saw the John Chamberlain show, which was really remarkable. PIE You’re both known for running very successful companies on your own, so I’m curious about the collaborative process between the two of you. LL Larry and I have known each other for a long time. MML Hospitality was born in 2021, when I joined with Larry and Tom [Moorman], who had already been working together since 2009. And now we all work on restau- rants and hotels together. Also, before that, Larry and I had started Lambert McGuire Design, because we are both heavily involved in the creation of our brands and places, and so we wanted an in-house team. PIE Since both of you are so closely identied with Austin and West Texas, I’m curious about how you approach projects elsewhere. Larry, you touched on the menu and working with seasonal ingredients, but is there any shift in philosophy or change in your approach when you’re working somewhere like Aspen? LM We haven’t spread all over the place. We stayed in Austin for a long time before we started growing outside of it, so when we go somewhere, we really have to enjoy spending time there. When we started coming to Aspen for Clark’s, we rented a house and started skiing; now Tom and I both have second family homes here. We often come to Aspen together and also separately. Liz now comes up and skis. Aspen has always been a great t for us and we’ve really gotten to love it—the outdoors, the people, the art scene. LL It was the home of Hunter S. Thompson and Thomas W. Benton—it has a long history as a rowdy, non- conformist place. PIE I know you have other projects here. Can you talk about what’s in the works for you? LM We bought the Aspen Chalet about four years ago. LL We’ve been working on it for a couple of years, so we’re excited to see it kick o. I think we both love hotels and restaurants that change neighbor- hoods, become an anchor. PIE One of the themes I see in your work is restoring the hotel and the restaurant into more of a community space. LL We like places that feel alive, and maybe the only way for them to really feel alive is to infuse them with community and reasons for people to go and gather there. We like places where you can bring your whole family and which kids will love, too. LM We don’t love newness, but I think we try to bring something new to our projects. There’s a certain world- class quality that we’re after, from big metropolitan areas, but we usually choose to work in smaller places. LL And the Aspen Art Museum project is very exciting for us. We do a lot of going into older buildings that are not at their best, so it’s really great to go into such a beautiful space.
CAFÉ CULTURE Liz Lambert and Larry McGuire of MML Hospitality are bringing new flavors to the museum’s rooftop with Swedish Hill Aspen
well-known local bakery, open since the 1970s, that we bought ve years ago. We evolved it into more of a grand café, an all-day hangout. In terms of design, we’re denitely not trying to reinvent the wheel with this project, but to do something that accentuates the architecture, celebrates the views and embraces the airiness of the rooftop patio. We want to make the restaurant aordable and accessible to the whole town, and keep it healthy, all without compromising on quality. In the mornings, it’ll be a great place to have good coee and baked goods that we’ll produce at our bakery, Louis Swiss, down in the valley. We also really want to utilize the farmers’ market that
goes all summer, starting in June, which is right in front of the museum. We’re excited to have a seasonal, produce-driven menu, with handmade pastas, salads and sandwiches. We hope to be a great museum café. There are good examples emerging around the country, and we are trying to create something that locals will want to come to on a daily basis. LIZ LAMBERT Who doesn’t love a museum café? PIE I love a museum café—and don’t get me started on the gift shop! But yes, the museum is free, so it’s really accessi- ble, and anybody can come just to have lunch. LM Exactly, the museum’s always free, which is pretty unique, considering
PATRICIA ISABEL ESCÁRCEGA Larry, can you begin by telling me a little bit about how the partnership with the Aspen Art Museum came about? LARRY MCGUIRE We’ve had businesses in Aspen for six or seven years now, including Clark’s Oyster Bar, so we have forged some good relationships here, and through friends and people on the museum’s board, we began conversations about how to revamp the restaurant on the roof. PIE Can you talk about the concept, what the menu will look like and any design features? LM We’re dipping into an existing concept that we have in Austin, called Swedish Hill, which is a really
Illustration Clay Hickson
To learn more about our café, visit: aspenartmu- seum.org/cafe
Liz Lambert and Larry McGuire are partners, with Tom Moorman, at MML Hospitality. They live in Austin.
Patricia Isabel Escárcega is a journalist. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Engagement
STRONG TIES Every year, the Aspen Art Museum’s Artist Fellowship supports local artists, providing mentoring, resources, community and a public platform to Roaring Fork’s finest. Kelsey Boyd reports.
in 2019 when Harvey oered her a job at his gallery. Pao is now writing poetry based on her dreams—a signicant divergence from her visual practice. The voices of 26 fellows in six years argue that there is an exponential possibility for artists to sustain and grow a practice when there are oppor- tunities to shift away from the isolated and individualized characteristics of creative work. The fellowship at the Aspen Art Museum highlights what can be accomplished when contem- porary art museums leverage their strengths of knowledge-building and resource-sharing with their local creative community.
toward work presented at the conclu- sion of the program. “My nal work was titled West Wing Patterns of Power ,” shares Marilyn Lowey, a 2019–20 fellow. Before she was a visual artist, Lowey was a theatrical lighting designer, illuminating the stage for Neil Diamond, Cyndi Lauper and the Pope. But once, when scenery props didn’t arrive for a show and Lowey was faced with an empty space, her metaphoric light bulb went o, “light was telling the story.” West Wing Patterns of Power began as a theatrical replica of the White House Oval O¡ce, but Lowey eventually edited the room down to the two-tone herringbone ¢oor lit by the three iconic windows. She credits studio visits and conversations with her colleagues during the fellowship for shaping the nal work. “It is an incubation period,” says the museum’s School, Youth and Family Programs Manager and artist, Sabrina
Piersol of the fellowship. Actualizing a concept requires support, especially when an artist is experimenting with new ideas or material. In the crowded day of an artist sustaining a practice in the valley, it is surprisingly rare for them to receive meaningful feedback from peers or have a centralized place for dialog. Each year, the fellowship concludes with a well-attended public presenta- tion. 2022 fellow Paul Keefe was investigating opposing realities by the end of his fellowship, like the Mandela eect and other discrepancies in human recollection. Keefe decided the best way to present this concept was to produce a prerecording of himself that humorously interviewed Paul Keefe live in front of an audience. “It’s an opportunity to try something dierent,” shares artist Nori Pao, a 2023 fellow based in Carbondale. After many visits to Anderson Ranch as a resident artist, Pao moved to the valley permanently
When artist Sam Harvey arrived in Aspen in the 1990s, he encountered a cadre of artists doing wildly experi- mental and interesting work. Despite having very little money, in 2005 he partnered with fellow artist Alleghany Meadows to open Harvey/Meadows Gallery. They both knew the artistic community from working at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Meadows had a space at a local farmers’ market selling ceramics, so, as Harvey shared, regarding prospective collectors, “we had a foothold.” Many years later, the business partnership ended and the space was renamed Harvey Preston Gallery, but Meadows remained as a represented artist and Harvey contin- ues to guide the gallery. Creatives arriving in Aspen today encounter the same artistic vibrancy, but varied pathways to exhibiting in commercial venues. While the town has enjoyed the benets of recent cultural investments, limited commercial space has narrowed the scope of galleries and project spaces. Local artists turn to nonprots like The Art Base and Red Brick Center for the Arts to exhibit, and are extending both living and work- ing spaces across the greater Roaring Fork Valley. “To be an artist is a ton of work,” said Harvey. “You have to make the work, let people know about the work, and go to events where you can meet people to talk about the work. It’s a contact sport.” Artist Teresa Booth Brown agrees. When approached by the Aspen Art Museum to propose ways the institution could support local artists, she “came back with a list!” The concept she put forward for a fellowship encouraged direct engagement between artists and the museum’s community while oering a suite of programs that were not available elsewhere for artists. In 2018, the Aspen Art Museum Artist Fellowship welcomed its rst cohort. The museum connects fellows to visiting artists and curators, such as artist Doug Aitken and curator Chrissie Iles, organizes studio visits, provides professional development by Brown, who is now Director of Education and Community Programs, and pays an honorarium that most fellows put
Below Aspen Art Museum’s 2023 Artist Fellows: Nori Pao, Savanna LaBauve, Brian Colley, Brad Reed Nelson, Chris Hassig and Annie Bell. Photograph: Amy Gurrentz
Kealey Boyd is a writer and art critic. She lives in Denver.
Read more about our learning programs, including our summer workshops, on our website: aspenart museum.org/learning
To learn more about our fellowship program, visit: aspenartmuseum. org/learning/ artist-fellowship
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
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Aspen People
Spanning historical and 20th-century works, the Western contemporary canon and artists of the Global South, the collection in the Aspen home of ArtCrush co-chairs Jen Rubio and Stewart Butterfield is rich in juxtapositions and through lines. “I think all of the right things start to find their way to each other,” Rubio tells Xerxes Cook.
HOME AND AWAY
We rented at first and then decided to buy a house, and we moved here full time at the end of 2020. XC A leap of faith. JR Yes, it’s been our home since then—for almost four years now. XC And how do you find Aspen life? JR We love to be outdoors and Stewart loves to ski. Of course there are a lot of amazing places for that in the US, but what especially drew us to Aspen was its rich cultural scene: the Aspen Institute, Jazz Fest, the Aspen Art Mu- seum, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. XC How did you get involved with the museum? JR I was struck by the quality of the exhibitions at the museum and all the people involved on the board when we first arrived. And one of the people who
was most welcoming to me when I first moved here was Jamie Tisch, who was co-chair of ArtCrush for the last three years. She invited us to our first gala, and she’s the one who turned me on to the idea of becoming a co-chair myself. Our first real involvement was last year when we hosted an event at our house for all the artists who had come to town for ArtWeek. The goodwill the museum has with artists, how they feel supported, really resonated with me. That first week in August is really there to celebrate the artists. XC You have just come back from Venice. What were your impressions? JR It was actually our first Biennale. It was really exciting to go, and our focus this year was less about discovery, and more about going to see the artists
that we already support and collect. Ewa Juszkiewicz, whose work we collect in depth, has a show there at Palazzo Cavanis that was exceptional, and we finally had the opportunity to meet her. There was a lot of work by Louis Fratino in the Giardini, who we also collect. Salman Toor, too. I would say it’s only been six or seven years since we started collect- ing seriously. We collect what we love—things we’re drawn to, artists we connect with. We’ve started to look at things more holistically in the last few months and take stock of what we have. One thing that surprised me: if you take all the artists in our collection of several hundred works, by country of origin, it comes down to 32 countries. Half of those are countries that are usually
XERXES COOK What drew you to Aspen? JEN RUBIO
Opposite Jen Rubio at her home in Aspen, 2024 Clockwise from left: works by Lucas Arruda, Marlene Dumas, Mariano Barbasán Lagueruela, George Condo, Michelangelo del Campidoglio, Kara Walker, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Lisa Yuskavage
It was a pandemic move. When Stewart and I got engaged, I lived in New York where I was building my business, Away, and he lived in San Francisco, where he was building his company, Slack. We split our time between the two cities or met up when we were traveling for work. It was a game of chicken: who was going to move to New York, who was going to move to San Francisco? Then, in 2020, we happened to get locked down in San Francisco and after a few months, we decided we wanted to go somewhere where we could be outdoors. And we chose Aspen. We had a lot of friends who said good things about it and we knew some people here.
Photography Benjamin Rasmussen
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regarded as part of the Global South. We have works by artists from Jamaica, Morocco, the Philippines, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Chile, Romania, Cuba. I think it’s interesting that while things we’ve done from a philanthropic angle have been very intentional, when it comes to diversity and access, this level of diversity in our own collection has come organically. XC Yes, I know that you endowed a curatorial position at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York which is focused on Latinx art. JR That’s been super successful, and was very intentional and was about access and diversity. But for me, there’s something very satisfying about seeing that the collection we’ve built organically over the years also reects diversity, even if that wasn’t what we set out to do. XC Are there pieces that are just Jen, and pieces that are just Stewart, shall we say? JR Yes, but it all seems to work together. If I really don’t like something, or if Stewart really doesn’t like some- thing, it ends up in our respective oces. We each have our own taste, and we gravitate to dierent things, but when it comes to a major purchase or acquisi- tion, we both have to love it. Actually, it’s really nice that through each other, we discover things that we might not engage with otherwise. XC In what way are the works that you both gravitate toward a reection of your individual personalities? JR We like very dierent types of art, but I think what’s been interesting is that the themes are pretty much the same. For example, Stewart recently bought an 18th-century portrait of a father and his son at home. And I recently bought a Carrie Mae Weems photograph—a super tender, provocative image of a husband and wife from the “Kitchen Table Series.” And somehow, they just go together. In fact, we were looking at all these dier- ent themes that have emerged in our collection and there are nearly 100 works that have to do with relationships within the home and family. XC With the span of your collection, historically, it must be fascinating to nd the through line that connects someone like Jan Brueghel the Elder with Lucas Arruda, for example. How do you make connections between some of the surrealists you collect and artists like Vija Celmins? What unites those works? JR We have a work from Vija Celmins’s “Blackboard” series in which she recreates blackboards she nds—the wood, the nails that connect the frame, the chalkboard marks. It’s installed inside a lit vitrine, at the end of the hallway in our house in Aspen, and every single person who comes to our house stands in front of it for an uncomfort- ably long amount of time trying to guess which one is the original and which is the copy. It’s the same experience you’ll have looking at a René Magritte painting. Or works by Gertrude Abercrombie. These works all disorient you in some way. XC Do you play around with juxtapo- sitions when you are installing works in your home? JR We try to live with every single piece, so we rotate works a lot. Ultimately, I think all of the right things start to nd their way to each other. We have a Rauschenberg collage from 1964, and when you put that next to a Beatriz Milhazes work from 2022, it just works. We have a Joan Mitchell triptych next to a Richard Prince “Cowboy” painting, and it works.
Above Works by Vija Celmins (front wall), Alexander Calder (suspended from the ceiling) and Robert Rauschenberg (right wall) Opposite, top Works by Nan Goldin (left) and Sanford Biggers (right) Opposite, bottom Work by Camille Henrot
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So, I called Gagosian and said, “Hi, I’d like to buy an Ed Ruscha.” I was on hold for so long! But I did end up speaking with someone and anyway, to cut a long story short, they didn’t have one avail- able, obviously, but I mentioned this whole thing to Stewart. He found one at auction six months later, and bought it for me—that was one of our rst pieces.
For example, we funded Free Friday Nights at the Whitney, and the results have been incredible: the visitor base has become much younger and much more diverse. XC You mentioned an early acquisition of a work by Alicja Kwade, but what was the very rst thing that you and Stewart bought together? JR It wasn’t exactly together, but he bought me an Ed Ruscha—a litho- graph of Jet Baby , the mountain paint- ing. This is actually quite a funny story, because before I was a collector, I didn’t really know how it worked. I didn’t know that you don’t just go to galleries and buy things. So, I’d seen Jet Baby in a photograph online and it really resonated with me—it felt relevant for Away, and I’m always traveling.
works on there that really couldn’t exist anywhere else. The goal eventually is to make it open to the public. XC I know you quite often support younger and emerging artists when it comes to funding major museum shows. JR Being able to support artists, especially in the earlier stages of their career, is a really meaningful thing for me. I’m on the board of the Whitney, and have great relationships with MoMA, the Met and LACMA. If there are conversations already taking place and we can provide the nancial support to make something happen, then that becomes really rewarding for everyone involved: the artists, institutions, galleries and other collectors. And then, on the other end of that, it’s important to us that there’s access to these shows.
XC Talking about the “Cowboy” painting—can you tell me about your foundation in New Mexico? JR We have a ranch in Galisteo in New Mexico, which is about 25 minutes from Santa Fe. Galisteo has a popula- tion of a few hundred people but lots of artists live and work there—Lynda Benglis, Bruce Nauman, Harmony Hammond, Judy Chicago. The ranch has many thousands of acres and the idea is to invite artists to make works there. One of the early pieces Stewart and I bought together was an Alicja Kwade sculpture, and now she is one of the rst artists we approached to do something on the ranch. The idea is that it’s somewhere with fewer boundaries in terms of time and space. We are interested in putting
Above Works by Anselm Kiefer and François- Xavier Lalanne
Support cutting-edge programming and join an exciting community of art lovers by becoming a patron of the Aspen Art Museum: aspen artmuseum.org/join
Jen Rubio is the co-founder and CEO of Away. She lives in Aspen and New York. Xerxes Cook is a writer and editor who regularly con- tributes to 032c , Interview , Purple and Vogue . He lives in Bali, Indonesia, and London, UK.
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