Aspen, where art, aspiration and altitude collide

On a frosty weekend in 1939, Elizabeth “Pussy” Paepcke of Chicago was entertaining a house full of guests on her Colorado Springs ranch when a plumbing disaster required her to improvise a new itinerary. She led them all on an adventure across the mountains to a derelict mining town snuggled in a remote corner of the high Rockies. The party slept in a ramshackle lodging house, with no idea that this trip would decide the future of this now luxurious mountain retreat. The next morning, they commandeered a miner’s truck that got them halfway up Aspen Mountain; a five-hour hike on skis with seal skins remained to reach the summit. “At the top, we halted in frozen admiration,” Paepcke wrote in her memoir, published in the Aspen Daily News. “Mountain range after mountain range succeeded another, rising like storm-driven waves.”

Like Pussy, I arrive in Aspen via the mountain crossing. Flying over the Rockies is spectacular, and private jets ferry Aspenites back and forth from New York, Los Angeles or Texas daily. But those people miss the abandoned mining towns, the picture-perfect main street of Leadville, the forests, waterfalls and mountain passes, and the feeling of entering true wilderness.

About an hour out of town, the sky begins to darken, just the faintest orange glow lingering on the far horizon. The road becomes dark, vertiginous, the hairpin turns made more hazardous by herds of elk out for their evening graze and foxes darting across my path. I cross over Independence Pass at the Continental Divide, and wind laboriously down into the valley where Aspen lies. 

The small grid of streets with flat-roofed brick buildings has the proud charm of a typical postcard-ready Western town, amplified by intentionally dim street lights; in 2003 Aspen passed an ordinance regulating light intensity outside homes, in accordance with the recommendations of DarkSky International; last year it implemented a further ordinance, fining homes and businesses for “light trespass”. The hush is disturbed only by the laughter of groups exiting restaurants, buzzing on tequila and the 2,400m altitude.

The next day I swap the car for a mountain gondola. The town soon disappears from view; a new landscape opens, vast and wild. The jagged peaks of the Rockies spike upward from a foreground of green lodgepole pines; patches of snow reflect the late-afternoon sunlight.

A crowd begins to form around a three-tier structure resembling an alien treehouse, created by the artist Ryan Trecartin. Here, at the 3,417m summit of Aspen Mountain (Ajax, in the local lingo), Trecartin is performing Audience Plant 2024, a score he composed between 2017 and this year as “headphone music for gardeners and scores for plants and outdoor spaces”. Commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and organised in collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival and School, the work is a collaboration that is being performed for one night only with the jazz musician Jason Moran, and the Aspen Music School’s Contemporary Ensemble. The invitation suggests that guests “prepare for cool, high-altitude conditions and wear appropriate footwear for walking over rocky terrain”. There are lots of cowboy hats. There are “hippies” in Moncler and socialites in Patagonia. I spot a nude body suit matched with pink cowboy boots. 

As the sun sinks behind the mountains, Trecartin’s structure begins to glow. For the most intensely stimulating hour of transition from day to night, hot to cold, an audience of hundreds sits entranced on the grassy meadow as the artists perform, accompanied by a breeze swaying the trees. The concert ends as night descends and the scent of (legal) marijuana dissolves in the chill mountain air. The gondola ride down in darkness adds another layer to the experience, confirmation that this could have happened nowhere but here.

Aspen is mostly known as a glamorous ski resort; a place where celebrities and the super-rich converge on the slopes, at après-ski parties and in the luxury shops that line the small town’s streets. The exceptional and reliable snow conditions and the challenging and varied terrain guarantee its continued winter-destination appeal; but this is only part of Aspen’s identity. Pussy and her husband Walter Paepcke roused the once-booming silver mining town from its sleep with their utopian vision, and set it on course to become the year-round meeting place of international intellectuals it is today. The story of its trajectory is a fast read, animated by the 20th century’s most infamous personalities engaging in eccentric activity: Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff and Andy Warhol skied Buttermilk. The summer cultural season reveals this Aspen, where morning hikes lead to tequila-fuelled lunches, seminars end with a cold plunge in a glacial stream, art exhibitions are often more provocative than those that open in New York, and concerts happen at 3,417m altitude. It is during these hyper-social summer months that the Paepckes’ original, and still radical, Aspen Idea is at its most enjoyable.

Six years after her first trip, Pussy Paepcke returned, this time with Walter, who was president of the Container Corporation of America, a philanthropist and patron of the arts. Their intention was to revive the town, creating a place where philosophy, nature, sport and art would converge. The master plan was put into action at once; they lured philosophers, designers, musicians, artists, and philanthropists to this utopia where mind, body and soul could thrive in equal measure. Buildings were bought and restored, including the Wheeler Opera House and the Hotel Jerome, which quickly became the social hub of the growing community. Walter Paepcke’s Aspen Skiing Company built modern lifts and developed trails. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he founded the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, now known as the Aspen Institute. Designer Herbert Bayer began creating a visual identity for the town and its institutions, implementing progressive Bauhaus visual codes. One of the first structures he built was the Music Tent, which housed the Aspen Music Festival and School – today it is one of the premier classical music institutions in the US and is celebrating its 75th year. The Aspen Institute, meanwhile, became a leading international centre of intellectual life, a true renaissance think tank. The philosopher Mortimer Adler began referring to Aspen as “the Athens of the west”.

The Aspen Ideas Festival is akin to the Davos Economic Forum; the Aspen Center for Physics has brought world-renowned physicists together since 1962, and the Music Festival and School continue to attract the most accomplished musicians from around the globe. Separate entities, they share a campus of exceptional architecture, framed by Aspen’s peaks and shaded by the namesake white-trunked trees. 

The only sounds on entering the campus are the gurgling of a stream, the rustle of leaves and an orchestra rehearsing in the tent (this iteration designed by Eero Saarinen). Locals have brought folding chairs and sit on the lawn by the stream, enjoying the free concert. I head towards the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome where the artists Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are performing Ancestors of the Blue Moon, a sound bath.

For one hour I lie in the dome, a weighted pillow over my eyes, as Sinh Soin recites her poetic invocation and Tappeser strikes a gong. “The mighty river gushing!” she proclaims. Then, like pebbles being pushed by the flow of the mighty river, a soothing rumble passes over me – a rattle made of goats’ hooves. “You may feel emotional today. Drink lots of water,” advises Singh Soin. 

I am a bit emotional as I walk back into town across the campus to the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, past the famously beautiful homes. I realise that not once has the real-estate boom, luxury shopping, or anything commercial or material entered into any conversation. All we seem to talk about is the Aspen Idea.

“The original value system from that time was what was in your mind, how well you knew poetry and philosophy and appreciated music, not to mention whether you could ski!” says longtime Aspen resident DJ Watkins, director of the Aspen Collective Gallery. “When people are surrounded by the mountains, their creativity is unlocked.” Watkins’ gallery, inside the Bayer-redesigned Wheeler Opera House, shows artists from the Aspen area and beyond; there are works by Hunter S Thompson alongside graphic design by Aspen activist and printmaker Thomas W Benton, made for Thompson’s 1970 run for sheriff of Pitkin County. 

The notorious author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a
long-time Aspen resident and personifies its era of radical nonconformity, a time when Paepcke and Bayer’s original Aspen Idea was being accessorised with heavy drug use. The rapid growth of the town put developers and radicals at odds; Thompson’s campaign platform called for anti-development actions such as ripping up all city streets and planting them with grass, so the only possible transportation modes would be foot, bike, horse, or ski.

It was in parallel to the party-fuelled fury of 1970s Aspen that a group of visionary artists founded Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, now the Aspen Art Museum. The inaugural exhibition in June 1979, American Portraits of the Sixties and Seventies, showed works by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Chuck Close, Willem De Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol and others.

This founding group laid down the blueprint for an institution to do in Aspen what can be done nowhere else. “I always return to what it means to be an artist-led institution,” Aspen Art Museum director Nicola Lees tells me. “The museum was founded 45 years ago by artists, and I think it is important to honour that history as we shape its future. That means venturing with artists into uncharted territory, letting them lead you into the unknown.” She notes that in conversations with Allison Katz and Ryan Trecartin during Art Week, talk kept returning to the concept of the museum as an incubator for ideas. “They do not need to arrive fully formed. We step in and help usher them into existence. This is how you cover new ground and generate novel conversations in artistic fields.” Unburdened by a permanent collection, Lees is free to push the museum’s programming into more experimental territory, and she has the full support of the community to do so.

While The Aspen Institute maintains a tangible link to the founding ideals of this special town, the Aspen Art Museum has emerged as the fast-beating heart of the valley. It beats faster still in summer with the arrival of Art Crush, a celebration of contemporary art offering a free public programme of performance, lecture and special tours, culminating in a glamorous gala and auction.

Early one morning I join Daniel Merritt, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, and a group of gallerists and curators for a hike along Smuggler Mountain Trail. He introduces me to the artist Lena Henke who, along with Aspen-based collector and hiking enthusiast Erin Leider-Pariser, leads us up the mountain, past rushing waterfalls, into a clearing with a stunning view over the valley, mountains thrusting in all directions. We sit on the trunks of fallen Aspen trees, while Henke gives a talk about making pathways and connections to the earth.

Later, after an hour of hiking, we are still discussing ideas. Evan Reiser, one of the directors of Henke’s New York gallery, Bortolami, admits he has already been on a run. Another friend mentions an earlier cold plunge with some collectors. I understand something fundamental: in Aspen, things happen outside – exercise, and also art deals.

Post-hike, I rush back to the museum. It is the 10th anniversary of the current building, a masterpiece by Shigeru Ban. On the rooftop, amid artwork by Henke, all of Aspen has again congregated, this time to honor Ban. A glance around the room reveals the whole community of mega-collectors is present: the Phelans, whose generosity guarantees free entrance to the museum in perpetuity, are in a standing area off to one side. I see Jen Rubio, co‑founder of Away Luggage, and her tech entrepreneur husband Stewart Butterfield; arguably two of the town’s most charismatic young collectors. Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown director of the Whitney Museum, is front row. The artist Jacqueline Humphries is here, as is Allison Katz. Katz has installed a thrillingly ambitious exhibition of her own painting alongside works on loan from local private collections; the show is constructed to mimic the layers of public and private spaces in ancient Pompeiian homes, and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii has lent magnificent remnants of frescoes and mosaics, many of which are being shown in the US for the first time.

Ban speaks of encounters with people sceptical of the merits of building with common materials. Those who say “you cannot do this”, he asserts, really mean “you cannot do this as it is already known”. A very Aspen take. 

I spend my last morning with Marianne Boesky. The New York-based art dealer has been coming to Aspen since she was a child and is deeply tied to the community, and her gallery shows here during the summer cultural season. She has the glowing clarity I’ve found common among Aspenites: intellectual, generous, fun. “Fundamentally Aspen is about spending meaningful time with people,” she explains. “The community here shares ambition. This is as evident in their professional success as in their collecting. Beyond this, there is an intellectual and physical rigour.” I leave with a hot-pink trucker hat emblazoned with “Bitchcoin” by the artist Sarah Meyohas, whom Boesky represents.

Nicola Lees may be newer to Aspen than Boesky, but they share a vision. “The community is distinguished by genuine curiosity, a spirit of adventure, and an awareness of cultural discourse worldwide. Seeing as we are geographically distinguished, and outside urban centres, there is a freedom and openness that comes with that.”

And there happens to also be world-class skiing.