There is an ongoing force that has pulled some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th and 21st century to Aspen. Ever since Elizabeth and Walter Paepke founded the Aspen Institute and infused this town with cultural purpose, a steady stream of artists have visited and sought sanctuary here.
Patrons such as John Powers invited the likes of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns to Aspen, while organizations such as Anderson Ranch and the Aspen Art Museum established key outposts for the exploration of contemporary art.
This exhibition begins Hexton’s look at the ripple effect these early efforts had on the trajectory of Aspen’s own art history and its broader impact on the visual arts:
Herbert Bayer, the Austrian Surrealist and Bauhaus artist, came to Aspen in 1945 when the Paepke’s commissioned him to design the Aspen Institute’s campus. He is now the subject of his own museum on the Institute’s grounds. Friedel Dzubas, a German abstract painter who shared a studio with Helen Frankenthaler, arrived in Aspen in the mid-60’s to lecture at the Aspen Institute. Christo and Jeanne-Claude came in the early 70’s looking for a site to install their Valley Curtain project, the conceptual art duo’s first large-scale outdoor installation in the US. Richard Carter, was invited to Aspen in 1972 to be Herbert Bayer’s studio assistant, remaining an important cultural icon in this valley from that point forward.
Contemporary painter and designer Evan Hecox found inspiration from the Aspen Institute’s landscape and design aesthetic while visiting multiple times in the early 70’s with his artist parents, having recently returned with a solo exhibition highlighting the valley’s influence on his work. Linked to visual cues in Bayer’s strong geometric forms, Rachel Garrard’s paintings, totems, and iconography are indicative of the spiritual power of Aspen and will be featured in a 2023 solo exhibition here. Brazilian artist Rebecca Sharp, who now lives and works in Colorado, picks up on the Surrealist lineage of which Bayer was a part, updating it in her intimate paintings that explore our experience within the natural world. Sharp will be an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch in the spring of ’23 where she will make work for her first Aspen solo show later that summer.
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