July 27–31, 2026
Aspen Colorado 81611
United States
Next week, Aspen Art Museum’s festival of art and ideas returns to the mountains. AIR: Figures in a Landscape (July 27–31) is inspired by a title that recurs across literature, cinema, music, and painting, reflecting the interdisciplinary spirit of the program while naming an unstable relationship between subject and setting. The program of commissions, performances, talks, and readings draws upon Aspen’s landscape, a tapestry of raw wilderness and mediated environments, to question how acts of staging and human intervention shape understandings of place and power.
Commissions and performances
Set in motion by Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals (July 2, 2026–April 11, 2027), AIR 2026 extends from museum to mountaintop, chapel to ranch, and theater to meadow. Camille Henrot presents the world premiere of Commedia dell’arte, a slapstick satire that stages a New York City apartment building within the Wheeler Opera House, co-commissioned by LYRA Art Foundation, Performa, and Aspen Art Museum / Wheeler Opera House. Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar rises on a monumental vertical screen superimposing one glacial landscape atop another, accompanied by an ensemble led by Deantoni Parks. Ivan Cheng introduces a new “live situation for camera.” Lyle Ashton Harris brings an encyclopedic montage of oral histories and artistic influences to the museum’s rooftop. Two early morning concerts conjure immaterial sonic landscapes: performing on the Aspen Chapel’s newly restored organ, Kali Malone weaves intricate and evolving harmonic cycles, and Los Thuthanaka’s expansive, genre-melding compositions reverberate from the peak of Aspen Mountain. Carrying forward the festival’s iterative trajectory, with each edition evolving from the last, Matthew Barney unveils ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, a new sculpture developed from his AIR 2025 performance.
Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes
This year's Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes bring together three artists whose work has profoundly reshaped the contemporary cultural landscape across film, literature, performance, and the visual arts. Writer, filmmaker, and artist Miranda July takes the stage following the publication of her bestselling novel All Fours, and the wide-ranging conversations it has sparked around aging, desire, and reinvention. Following her participation in the landmark exhibition Monuments (MOCA and The Brick, Los Angeles), filmmaker Julie Dash’s keynote marks thirty-five years since her feature Daughters of the Dust, whose singular cinematic language continues to influence generations of artists. Returning to Aspen after the premiere of TACTICAL parallax at AIR 2025, Matthew Barney reflects on three decades of artworks that construct symbolic worlds where ritual, history, spectacle, and violence converge, alongside the unveiling of ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, an outdoor sculpture that extends the narrative and spatial logic of last year's performance
Talks and readings
Shifting registers between the incantatory, the meditative, and the epochal, AIR 2026 commissions artists, writers, and thinkers to awaken consciousness through poetry, talks and collective exchange. Morgan Bassichis positions performance as a means of resurrection, tracing the recurrence of ghosts within cultural memory and their desire to inhabit these spectres. Nuar Alsadir and Patrick House stage a shape-shifting encounter that unsettles the contours of laughter, consciousness, and selfhood in real time. In the early morning stillness of Aspen Chapel, poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis orbit the “vertigo of the infinite,” a generative dizziness that arises when the mind brushes up against the boundlessness of the cosmos and the limits of perception.
To view the schedule and learn more about registration, please visit airaspen.org. All programming is free and registration is now open to the public.
Aspen Art Museum’s AIR festival is founded and directed by Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO. Figures in a Landscape is curated by Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator; Vic Brooks, Senior Curatorial Advisor; Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large; Claude Adjil, Eliza Ryan, and Anisa Jackson, Curators-at-Large, with Mariana Fernández, AIR Editor and Project Curator.
The Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes are made possible through a major gift from Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.
The Tisch Discovery Series—a dynamic selection of commissions, performances, and dialogues presented throughout the week—are made possible through a generous gift from Steve Tisch and Jamie Tisch.
