Aspen Colorado 81611
United States
The Aspen Art Museum is pleased to announce its summer slate of exhibitions, featuring Adrián Villar Rojas, Arch Connelly, and Kerstin Brätsch. The exhibitions will build upon the conversations and themes of the second installment of AIR, Aspen Art Museum’s flagship initiative. AIR 2026 will take place in Aspen from July 27 to July 31, 2026.
Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals
July 2, 2026–April 11, 2027
Adrián Villar Rojas’s newly opened solo exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals takes over two floors of the Museum, evoking both the geological and mythological formation of a cave. In Villar Rojas’s approach, the cave functions as a space of double accumulation: geologically shaped through eons of material deposition and mineral consolidation, and culturally layered with human projections, rituals, and symbolic activity. Within this environmental transformation sits a new sculpture co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Untitled (from the series The Language of the Enemy), a life-size triceratops skull. The work imagines a prehistoric meeting between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as a possible moment when the first gestures of meaning or image-making passed between species. In this new work, Villar Rojas proposes a theoretical history that challenges prevailing anthropocentric narratives of human exceptionalism. While symbolic creation has long been framed as an invention of Homo sapiens, recent findings suggest that Neanderthals may have engaged in such practices before us. Here, the encounter becomes a site of transmission: what we consider the foundation of human culture may have been inherited from a now-vanished branch of the human lineage. In this view, the birth of art is not a triumph of our species but a gift from another. Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator-at-Large.
Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray
June 12, 2026–October 11, 2026
Straighten Your Wig and Pray is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Chicago-born artist Arch Connelly. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of his career from the early 1980s to 1993, the year of his death from AIDS-related complications. Much of Connelly’s work mirrors the fragility and darkness of that time, yet joy, beauty, and humor remain enduring forces within his work. Connelly emerged as a vibrant figure within New York’s East Village art scene and is known for reimagining the visual vocabularies of Minimalism and Pop through a camp, craft-based, glamorous sensibility. The exhibition includes several pieces by Connelly that have not been seen publicly in more than thirty-five years, gathered through unprecedented research into collections and oral histories. Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is made possible by generous support from Maison Valentino, with additional support provided by J.P. Morgan Private Bank, and is curated by Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large, with Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator.
Kerstin Brätsch: Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen)
May 20, 2026 to March 31, 2027
Kerstin Brätsch’s rooftop commission Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen) comprises a new series of four sculptural mosaic benches, reflecting her interest in traditional craft methods across her practice. The benches build upon the artist’s Fossil Psychics works, in which Brätsch uses the 17th-century Italian technique stucco-marmo to colorfully depict fossils and otherworldly creatures. The benches are designed to accommodate growing plants within them, allowing the work to evolve over the course of the exhibition and respond to its environment. Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Aspen) is curated by Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large, Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, and Nicola Lees, Artistic Director and CEO.
Aspen Art Museum exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. Support for artists is made possible by the Beckmann Kotzubei Artist Residency Fund. Major support is provided by Aspen Art Museum Exhibition Circle, with special thanks to Sarah Arison, Daniel English, Nancy Magoon, H. Gael Neeson, Cecilia and Ernesto Poma, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Allison Rose, Patrick Ryan, Gayle Stoffel, and Mary Zlot. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by Aspen Art Museum National Council.
