The Aspen Art Museum has unveiled AIR, a $20 million, decade-long initiative aiming to position artists as leaders in shaping society. Launching this July, AIR will culminate in a yearly summer festival in Aspen, complemented by an artist-led retreat. The program is rooted in the museum’s artist-founded legacy and aspires to tackle contemporary challenges through ambitious research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and boundary-pushing commissions.
Titled Life As No One Knows It, the inaugural AIR festival will run from July 26 to August 1, 2025, featuring artists such as Paul Chan, Maya Lin, Glenn Ligon, and Francis Kéré. Inspired by Chan’s AI experiments and Sara Imari Walker’s book of the same name, the event will aims interrogate what it means to be alive in an era of rapid technological change. The festival’s blend of keynotes, dialogues, and commissioned works will unfold across Aspen, while the retreat will convene thinkers from diverse disciplines to generate fresh ideas.
AIR draws inspiration from Aspen’s legacy as a hub of innovation and the historic Aspen International Design Conference (1949–2006), which showcased icons like John Cage and Susan Sontag. By fostering collaboration and critical thinking, AIR seeks to advance Aspen’s reputation as a global cultural hub. The initiative is backed by a slate of notable donors including Sarah Arison, Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Charlie Pohlad, and Melanie and Adam Lewis, as well as corporate partner Lugano.
The International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) was founded by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke as a way to bridge the worlds of art and commerce. Inspired by the Bauhaus philosophy, the conference aimed to promote collaboration between artists, designers, and manufacturers to elevate everyday objects through modern design and foster business profitability. IDCA was an outgrowth of the 1949 Goethe Festival, which celebrated German culture and drew cultural enthusiasts to Aspen, helping revitalize the town.
With luminaries like Josef Albers, Charles Eames, and Louis Kahn among its early participants, IDCA quickly established itself as a hub for high-profile discussions on design and business. In 1982 a young Steve Jobs spoke at the conference and hinted at the technological advances that we take for granted today but that, at the time, could have been featured in an episode of The Jetsons: wifi, Google Earth, streaming, and AI.
“Since its founding, Aspen Art Museum has harnessed the energy of Aspen’s mountain landscape to create unforgettable exhibitions, public commissions and consequential gatherings,” Nicola Lees, the Nancy and Bob Magoon director of the Aspen Art Museum, to ARTnews. “The museum’s inaugural edition of AIR builds upon this history with an eye toward the future, bringing together visionaries from across the arts, science and technology for a week of interdisciplinary exchange.”
Lees added that the dialogues and commissions fostered by AIR will, over the next decade, will extend beyond contemporary art with a goal of forging connections across diverse fields and what she called “an enduring testament to the power of in-person convening and collaboration.”
