How Aspen Art Museum Is Looking to Redefine Itself for Next Generation

On a late July afternoon in Aspen, I stood in the lounge of a personal dwelling with mountain views streaming by means of a trio of practically flooring to ceiling home windows on one aspect and, on the opposite, a serious portray by Julie Mehretu looming over the stone hearth. Down the corridor hung a shocking Grace Hartigan, all chunky blocks of inexperienced and burnt sienna with muscular swoops of grey. This wasn’t a part of the Aspen Art Museum’s official Artwork Week circuit of collector visits; it was a personal go to to the house of a gracious host with a keenness for rowdy canines, popcorn, and world-class work. Actually, there have been no collector dwelling visits on the museum’s itinerary this yr. Final yr there have been three, and collector excursions had been an everyday function in earlier years.

In a city the place, for the reason that pandemic, dwelling values have soared—final yr, on line casino magnate Steve Wynn and low cost inventory mogul Thomas Peterffy co-purchased a $108 million dwelling there—the Aspen Artwork Museum’s annual fundraiser week used to radiate wealth, culminating in a glitzy wine-tasting get together at a collector’s dwelling and, the next night time, the museum’s equally glitzy gala.

However since Nicola Lees took over as director, in 2020, the technique has shifted to one thing extra cerebral. A couple of miles away from the house I visited, the Aspen Artwork Museum was getting ready a keynote presentation by German filmmaker Werner Herzog to be launched by artwork world über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist beneath the banner of its inaugural AIR festival—a 10-year, $20 million, artist-led interdisciplinary program—and, in case you take heed to the brand new messaging, the way forward for the establishment.

That distinction—the wealth on the partitions and the concepts onstage—says rather a lot about the place the museum finds itself in 2025. Twenty years after founding its gala, ArtCrush, in a city the place an house can run north of $4 million, the museum is trying a pointy shift towards being a worldwide establishment and away from its renown as a collector’s clubhouse.

The query is whether or not that’s even potential. Can Lees preserve the cash flowing to the museum whereas on the similar time taking the emphasis off Aspen’s deep pockets? Can a Kunsthalle tucked away in a tony hamlet grow to be a beacon of the worldwide artwork scene at the same time as the encompassing space grows more and more costly and is, to be sort, simple to get to provided that you’ll be able to afford it, and unimaginable to achieve in case you can’t? (For the sake of fairness, the museum has been free since 2008, due to Amy Phelan and her husband, John, who, in March, turned Secretary of the Navy beneath President Trump. However that hardly diminishes Aspen’s repute for turbulence-racked flights or the four-hour drive from Denver.) 

The Aspen Artwork Museum was by no means speculated to be quiet. When former director Heidi Zuckerman took over in 2005, she inherited a scrappy regional establishment in a city higher identified for its après-ski than its programming. By 2014, she had rebranded it totally—securing a $45 million Shigeru Ban–designed constructing within the heart of city, backed by a formidable group of donors whose artwork collections doubled as funding portfolios.

“This museum, on this setting, with this architect wouldn’t have existed with out Heidi’s imaginative and prescient, her tenacity and the group of supporters she had round her,” one supply advised me within the 50 minutes bookended by a chat between artist Adrián Villar Rojas and novelist Álvaro Enrigue titled “Historical Fictions, Future Myths” and a keynote by the Pritzker Prize–profitable architect Francis Kéré. Larry and Susan Marx, John and Amy Phelan, Bob and Nancy Magoon, they constructed this place, she stated.

Constructing the museum was no simple process. When Zuckerman began, she wanted greater than funding: She wanted armor. “Heidi had the thickest pores and skin of anybody I’ve ever met,” Larry Marx advised me. “Most individuals would’ve folded their tent and left city.”

On the time, the museum deliberate to construct on city-owned land. However the web site required a public referendum, and in a city that noticed the museum as a playground for the rich, the optics proved poisonous. “It was voted down two-to-one,” Marx recalled. “Folks stated, ‘You’re only a bunch of elites.’” (Finally, the museum acquired a plot of privately owned land.)

The criticism turned private, and a few in the neighborhood attacked Zuckerman’s revenue. She earned around $850,000 in 2013, which was nearer to her New York counterparts at MoMA and the Guggenheim than it was to equally regional establishments just like the MCA Denver and moCa Cleveland. “It was nasty,” he stated. “Sure, her revenue was very excessive that yr, however she saved us a fortune. She raised $70 million. What she made was rather a lot cheaper than if we had employed consultants to exit and lift the cash.”

By that point, ArtCrush, the annual summer time fundraising gala, had grow to be the marquee occasion, incomes the museum tens of millions. The Phelans hosted its extra personal counterpart, WineCrush, at their dwelling (folks nonetheless gab in regards to the Walead Beshty cracked mirror floor in their living room); Sotheby’s and J.P. Morgan sponsored the affair. The ticketed occasion turned a legendary spectacle of huge bottles and greater egos. Museum administrators mingled with Kardashians. There was superb eating, sommelier pairings of classic wine, and an afterparty throughout which, I’m advised, company wound up within the pool, with or with out garments. The final WineCrush was in 2019, one yr earlier than the museum’s present director, Nicola Lees, took the captain’s chair.

However for all of the absurdity, the establishment was undeniably profitable. The museum raised cash, drew massive names, and planted its flag in a resort city the place visibility mattered as a lot as credibility.

If Heidi Zuckerman constructed the museum, Nicola Lees has tried to redefine it. When she took the helm in 2020, Lees inherited not only a constructing, however an id—one cast within the gala period, pushed by collectors, and infrequently haunted by the very visibility it craved. Her problem was to not elevate $70 million or survive a referendum, however to remake the museum’s picture.

The AIR program is the clearest articulation of that mission. Structured like an Aspen Concepts Pageant for the artwork world, it affords talks, workshops, and collaborations geared toward reframing the museum as a middle for thought management moderately than a staging floor for social capital.

“It’s extra mental,” stated one longtime patron. “They’re making an attempt to maneuver away from the get together.”

The shift goes past programming. Zuckerman curated splashy solo exhibits; Lees delegates—to visitor curators, artists, and rising stars like Daniel Merritt, now chief curator.

As one collector put it: “I don’t know what she likes. I couldn’t inform you what her style is. However I can inform you she’s extraordinarily clever—and good at mending fences.”

That diplomacy issues. After years of scorched bridges—Zuckerman had sharp tooth, one museum benefactor advised me—Lees has restored calm, even whereas experimenting with new PR, a quieter gala, and extra considerate messaging. “What’s so fascinating to me is that Heidi did precisely what she wanted to do to construct the museum, and Nicola is doing precisely what she must do,” a director at a robust world gallery advised me. “It’s a very totally different imaginative and prescient, wildly totally different in model.” And it’s working. At a post-AIR dinner, I overheard one of many visitor artists saying that Lees was constructing “one
of probably the most culturally essential locations in america.”

The irony, after all, is that the hassle to downplay exclusivity requires extraordinary management—of message, of optics, of who will get within the room. Not like earlier years, press weren’t invited to the ArtCrush gala, which a museum consultant stated introduced in $4 million, proper consistent with what it’s raised since 2021. (Between 2015 and 2019 the fundraiser introduced in a mean of about $2.5 million a yr.)

When requested in regards to the exclusion of press, Lees advised me that, sure, it was intentional. Given the size and depth of the programming throughout Artwork Week, she thought it was extra thrilling for members of the press to focus as an alternative on the AIR invoice of fare—together with Matthew Barney’s TACTICAL parallax, an odyssey that concerned preventing rush-hour visitors to get to an offsite location for a efficiency that included horses, a sled canine group, and, per a pamphlet given to attendees, the “use of a firearm that discharges clean rounds.”

Nonetheless, sources say the museum was fuming after final yr’s protection, largely constructive, framed the occasion as a lavish summer time camp. In these pages, I described it as a spot the place “everyone seems to be invited to every little thing, with the caveat that it’s a must to make it there first.” If the objective is to alter the narrative, pulling the press from the gala was a daring first step.

Lees doesn’t precisely reject the premise of making an attempt to alter the museum’s repute as collector-built, however she doesn’t interact with it a lot both. “I don’t know if I’ve tried to alter it … they employed me figuring out who I used to be,” she advised me over a Zoom name joined by Merritt. Earlier than Aspen, she held roles on the Serpentine Galleries in London and NYU’s 80WSE Gallery.

The Aspen Artwork Museum, Merritt identified, was based by artists within the Seventies, “hippies and radicals” who got here to Aspen in quest of area and freedom. Lees agreed, saying the city itself was “based by thinkers,” and that the museum’s function immediately is to maintain that mental legacy alive, regardless of the shift in financial realities.

If the museum’s id has shifted beneath Lees, its help base has began to shift with it. Some longtime donors and board members have taken a step again. “You must let the museum evolve,” stated Larry Marx. “That’s a part of why I used to be completely satisfied to get off the board.”

Of their place, a quieter, youthful era has taken up the reins. Amnon Rodan, of the Rodan + Fields fortune, is now board president. He and his spouse, Katie, are a part of a gaggle that features Melony and Adam Lewis, and Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul—collectors with deep philanthropic expertise and little curiosity in spectacle.

Within the crowded café adjoining to the Resort Jerome, collector Holly Baril stated the brand new guard in Aspen “doesn’t wish to be entrance and heart.” Baril and her husband, Albert, helped discovered the Rising Artwork Fund at MOCA Los Angeles; they weren’t very concerned till Lees arrived, however love the trail Lees is taking. “Nicola’s created one thing folks wish to be a part of. A robust neighborhood that doesn’t really feel performative,” she stated.

This yr’s ArtCrush cochairs embody that shift: Sarah Arison, MoMA board president; Jen Rubio, cofounder of Away baggage and Whitney Museum trustee; and Charlie Pohlad, of the Minneapolis-based Pohlad household, mirror a community of rising collectors extra aligned with Lees’s mission.

A part of that mission is rooted within the museum’s construction: It has no everlasting assortment. For Albert Baril, that’s the important thing. “That’s the great thing about it,” he stated. “It’s a platform for discovery. They’re not hitting us as much as elevate one other hundred grand to purchase this or that.”

Aspen is a spot outlined by shortage—of land, housing, entry. “Aspen has at all times been costly,” stated realtor Riley Warwick. “However now it’s nearly embarrassingly costly.” Pre-pandemic, it was $1 million per bed room. Now? “Nearer to $2 million.”

Nonetheless, Lees and her group have discovered methods to root the museum in the local people. “We work with each single college within the valley,” she stated. “We see 3,000 kids come by means of our doorways within the spring for the Youth Art Expo.” That form of outreach could not dominate headlines like ArtCrush, but it surely displays a deep funding in Aspen’s mental and artistic future—whatever the housing market.

What sort of museum it turns into could rely much less on its intentions than on its environment. Aspen is just not a clean slate; it’s a rich enclave with a magnetic pull and a hefty price ticket. Even probably the most daring programming should take care of the place’s actuality: who can reside there, who can keep lengthy sufficient to care, and what sort of tradition thrives within the uncommon air between exclusivity and entry. 

A model of this text seems within the 2025 version of the annual High 200 Collectors problem, beneath the title “A Little Place Referred to as Aspen.”