The Visionaries Shaping Aspen’s Creative Cosmos

Text by Andrew Travers
Images by Sarah Kuhn, Olive & West Photography, Benjamin Rasmussen, and courtesy of the artists and galleries

A longtime Aspen-based curator and champion of the Bauhaus and modernism’s local footprint, Ballinger has been a caretaker of the Aspen Institute’s artworks long before it established a world-class museum in honor of legendary artist and designer Herbert Bayer. Ballinger, now overseeing a year-long exhibition on Bauhaus typography as director of the Institute’s Bayer Center, says artists and art organizations are collaborating in unprecedented ways and are shaping the future together.

“All of us are recognizing how dependent we are on each other’s success, and that our collective strength is much more formidable than our independent initiatives and successes,” she says, noting that entities large and small are teaming up. She points to innovative examples like The Art Base’s process-forward exhibition with artist Reina Katzenberger and the Aspen Chapel Gallery’s group shows benefiting local-serving nonprofits.

Ballinger says she is also anticipating a collaboration-driven public art movement in Aspen, galvanized by the nonprofit Buckhorn Public Arts and the city of Aspen’s burgeoning public art program. She predicts the Soldner Center will emerge as a space to watch for innovation in the years to come. It is now in its third summer of welcoming the public into the astoundingly preserved Aspen home and studio of the late ceramicist Paul Soldner, with Soldner’s daughter, Stephanie, at its helm.

As a curator, author, and advocate, DJ Watkins has looked to Aspen’s artistic and countercultural past to inspire those of us living in its present. For more than a dozen years in books and itinerant galleries, he’s illuminated the present by shining a light on the likes of printmaker Tom Benton and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, alongside emerging envelope-pushing artists like Axel Livingston.

Two summer 2024 initiatives, both years in the making, gave Watkins the chance to boost local artists’ careers and inspire new work. “I think there are still great artists here, and when artists come here from elsewhere, they make incredible work because Aspen is such an inspiring place,” Watkins says.

His latest gallery, the Aspen Collective, housed in the Wheeler Opera House, opened in May 2024 with a commitment to primarily show and sell work by local artists. His nonprofit Aspen Mountain Artist Residency launched in June 2024, hosting working artists for residencies in rustic cabins on its sprawling 200-plus acres of Eden-like wilderness on the backside of Aspen Mountain.

So, which Aspen artists did Watkins first tap for shows at the Aspen Collective? His picks include sculptor Leah Aegerter, painter and sculptor Chris Erickson, painter Samuel Prudden, multidisciplinary artist Whit Boucher, and ceramicist and gallerist Sam Harvey, who is curating a series of fall exhibitions for the gallery.

The residency and the gallery are designed to feed off of one another in the years to come. “The idea is that the artists can get into nature, disconnect from technology, have studio space and materials to create work,” Watkins explains. “Then I’ll be showing that work in the Wheeler Opera House.”

Contemporary Native American art has commanded the interest of the commercial art market, along with the acclaim of critics and curators, in 2024. But the partners behind Casterline|Goodman Gallery note that Indigenous artists were being celebrated in Aspen even before events like the Phillips auction house’s blockbuster 60-artist contemporary Native American art sale made art-world headlines in January 2024.

Jeffrey Gibson made history this year as the first Indigenous artist to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, soon after making his mark locally with the 2022 installation, performance, and Aspen-based film The Spirits Are Laughing at the Aspen Art Museum. Casterline|Goodman is showcasing artists like John De Puy and John Nieto, and the owners have enjoyed connecting collectors with Native American artists whose work has traditionally been undervalued and marginalized.

Casterline compares it to the days when the gallery was selling underappreciated Yayoi Kusama paintings for $200,000, with money-back guarantees if collectors weren’t happy with the pieces within a year. (You couldn’t buy them back for ten times that amount today, he laughs.)

The pair name-checked other Aspen galleries, including Galerie Maximillian, Baldwin Gallery, and Hexton Gallery, along with new entrants like the New Aspen Art Fair by 74tharts, noting each has a unique curatorial perspective but all have a competitive spirit that keeps them sharp and ahead of the trends. “The local scene always runs parallel with the national scene,” Goodman says. “Culture is the core of the town, so it permeates everything.”

Sought-after designer and art collector Sterling McDavid has honed her aesthetic chops curating her family’s contemporary and modern art collection, which includes Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans, a Richard Prince, and a large-scale KAWS sculpture. The next big thing on her radar is the Aspen Art Museum’s Shuang Li exhibition, “I’m Not,” opening in November 2024. Following the museum’s ambitious museum-wide Allison Katz show, McDavid predicts “I’m Not” will be a landmark show for Aspen and for Li.

“Her video work Æther (Poor Objects), which was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale, very much felt like an arrival for the artist,” McDavid says. For the Aspen show, co-commissioned with Swiss Institute, Li is creating abstracted architecture in panels of pastel-tinted resin, affixed with video monitors that display Shuang’s music videos. They’re set to cover versions of the American rock songs she used to learn English in her youth, translated into Li’s native Chinese.

McDavid pointed to the show as exemplary of the museum, the wider Aspen art scene, and its patrons, who she believes embrace creative risk and diversity like few other places in the world. “I think a lot of that has to do with the sophistication of the collectors in Aspen,” she says. “People take risks, and I see a much more interesting mix here.”

Carter has seen Aspen bloom, boom, bust, and transform many times over in the five decades he’s been making art here. The painter, instigator, former Herbert Bayer studio assistant, and Aspen Art Museum co-founder urges people to look downvalley to find locally based artists striking sparks and making creative fires the way they once did in Aspen. “The bright spot for me is downvalley,” explains Carter, whose home and studio are both now in Basalt.

He touts the work of artists from his midvalley cohort, including the painter and sculptor Tania Dibbs, collage and mixed-media artist Teresa Booth Brown, and multidisciplinary artist Kris Cox, noting that artists from Aspen’s outer boroughs of Basalt and Carbondale are more likely to be represented by galleries in Denver, Dallas, and New York than they are by Aspen galleries, where international blue-chip art and higher commercial rents have squeezed out regional artists. (Collectors can still discover them at nonprofit galleries such as the R2 Gallery in Carbondale and The Art Base in Basalt, where Carter is a board member.)

“There used to be a time when, if you were a decent artist, you could be represented in a gallery in Aspen, because there was that kind of rent structure,” says Carter, who published a book in summer 2024 that features his recent series of “Bunker” paintings. “But that has all completely disappeared.”