AIR unveils 2026 programming

Aspen Art Museum has revealed the programming for the second edition of AIR, the museum’s flagship program for interdisciplinary collaboration bringing artists and creative leaders together for hands-on projects, talks, site-based artworks and live performances. 

Launched in 2025, it runs all year and ends with a festival that celebrates how artists help shift perceptions of the world and expand shared consciousness.

“AIR wouldn’t exist without Aspen’s unique history of experimentation and exchange,” Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO Nicola Lees told The Aspen Times. “This year’s theme, ‘Figures in a Landscape,’ is also partly inspired by the particular experience of living in Aspen, an environment where incredibly scenic, often untouched, wilderness adjoins urban areas.  This contrast between nature and spaces of human intervention deeply informs the conversations and questions explored throughout the program.” 

This year’s festival runs from July 27-31.

‘First Gods, Lost Animals’

The festival opens with “First Gods, Lost Animals” — a multifloor exhibition by Adrián Villar Rojas. The show, on view for the duration of AIR, evokes the making of a cave, both the geology and the myth. It starts with a clear idea that humans have limits, facing a universe more complex than fully understandable, according to a press statement. To navigate, humans create systems and tools — religion, art, mathematics and, now, artificial intelligence. 

Villar Rojas, the Museum’s 2026 ArtCrush Gala honoree, will also give a talk. 

“Building upon Villar Rojas’ inquiries, the program 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 a place and its power,” according to the release.

Aspen connection

AIR 2026 treats Aspen as a living stage. It links the museum, the theater and the landscape as public spaces that shape how people gather and how history is performed. By casting Aspen as both setting and stage, this year’s program builds on ideas from the 2025 festival, which asked what it means to be human in a time of major technological change.

“AIR embodies the ideal of a non-collecting institution: a place where artists have time, space and resources to explore their ideas, even in their most nascent stages. The programming for this year’s festival showcases the iterative nature of the program, with commissions and dialogues emerging from the questions posed over the last year,” Lees said. “This year was also deeply informed by Adrián Villar Rojas’ concurrent exhibition at the museum, which grapples with the limits of human intelligence in the face of an infinitely complex universe — a challenge that artists are particularly adept at addressing.” 

This year’s AIR highlights artists Morgan Bassichis, Matthew Barney, Ivan Cheng, Lyle Ashton Harris, Camille Henrot, Lucy Raven and Villar Rojas; composers and musicians Kali Malone, Deantoni Parks and Los Thuthanaka. Writers and scholars Kaveh Akbar, Nuar Alsadir and Paige Lewis are also featured, along with filmmaker Julie Dash, who will deliver the keynote address.

Several 2025 participants return to push the questions they raised last year. In 2025, Matthew Barney debuted a new commission, “TACTICAL parallax,” and this year he will install a sculptural work next to the original performance site, continuing his focus on American football as an embodiment of violence in American life. Lucy Raven, who attended last year’s retreat, returns to present a film performance in an alpine valley.

For more information, visit airaspen.org or aspenartmuseum.org.