Crushing It: Aspen Rises as a Creative Capital
While Aspen has always been known as a winter playground for the upper echelon, a clique of high-powered art collectors and curators—and a summer season topped with a high-profile gala and auction benefitting the art museum—have turned this former mining town into a world class culture capital.
Photography Hunter Abrams
“Aspen is like a major metropolis in a small city in the mountains,” says San Francisco art collector Amnon Rodan. While the small ski town has always been known as a ritzy winter playground for A-listers, Rodan, along with a clique of other high-powered art patrons from around the globe, actually spend their summers here. In fact, come summer, the former mining town is crawling with curators, scholars, and collectors. There’s plenty to do, from the heady ideas coming out of the Aspen Institute, where everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton have spoken at symposiums, to the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, an expansive site of workshops and residencies which has hosted visiting artists like Catherine Opie, the Guerilla Girls, and Simone Leigh. There’s also the unexpected gallery boomlet with the last two summers seeing pop-ups from major galleries like Almine Rech, White Cube, and Lehmann Maupin. This summer, they were joined by French design dealers Carpenters Workshop Gallery, with other temporary spaces by LA’s Honor Fraser and New York’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
This seemingly unexpected contemporary art boom in a town of just under 7,500 people has been years in the making, according to Lehmann Maupin gallery director Carla Camacho. Long predating this influx of art dealers, she says, Aspen has been “a somewhat exclusive cultural center for this part of the world,” shaped in large part by the part-time residents who support the local arts in their home away from home. Major collectors like Rodan and his wife, Proactiv co-founder Katie Rodan; Los Angeles-based Jamie Tisch; and New York’s Amy Phelan have been longtime, dedicated patrons to the Aspen Art Museum.
The museum, which opened in 1979 and was given a radical renovation by Shigeru Ban in 2014, has staged major shows by international artists like Ugo Rondidone, Yayoi Kusama, and David Hammons. This past summer, the director Nicola Lees invited Nigerian artist and poet Precious Okoyomon to create a sculptural garden on the roof of the museum as well as a series of collaborations with musicians, theorists, and filmmakers.
The premiere event on Aspen’s cultural calendar is the institution’s annual ArtCrush—a week of fundraising events in August—culminating in a gala, which this year honored the painter Mary Weatherford. (At this year’s live auction, one of her paintings sold for $600,000.) As both the gala’s guest of honor and an LA artist known for incorporating neon tubes onto her colorful paintings, she also inspired the evening’s Electric Jungle theme. “We wanted it to feel like Mary in there,” says gala co-chair Jamie Tisch, describing the decor of tropical plants and lights as well as colorful metallics and florals that guests were dressed in for the evening. “We spend so much time in our workout wear in Aspen,” Tisch adds, “people love getting dressed up.”
The Los Angeles-based artist Adam Stamp added his own playful touch to the gala this year with his trio of woodthemed photo booths for guests, called Into the Woods. One was the interior of a cabin, complete with animal skins and taxidermy; another was a gay bar bathroom lined in particle board (“There isn’t a gay bar in Aspen, although it’s gay friendly,” he says.); and the third was a forest of aspen trees with gauzy, iridescent decor. “It was inspired by Disney’s Frozen,” Stamp explains, “very much in the style of bad prom decorations.”
As Amy Phelan, the gala’s co-chair, explains, “People really pull out all the stops. They know they’re going to be photographed, so they dress to the nines.” There was plenty to celebrate this year as ArtCrush set new records with more than $3 million in auction proceeds—the most ever raised for the museum.
We spend so much time in our workout wear in Aspen. People love getting dressed up. - Jamie Tisch
