SUMMER 2024 EDITION
ASPEN ART MUSEUM
21
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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