Each year, ArtCrush begins with the signature WineCrush evening event generously hosted by Amy and John Phelan at their Aspen home, which showcases the couple’s dynamic and important contemporary art collection (Wednesday, July 31). The intimate event includes a multicourse dinner catered by Caribou Club with wine pairings provided by Jay Fletcher and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits.

 

WineCrush is followed by the annual PreviewCrush cocktail reception (Thursday, August 1) at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery—hosted by gallery owner Richard Edwards—and the companion event, PreviewExtra, at Aspen’s Casterline|Goodman Gallery. Both receptions offer guests unique opportunities to view a wide selection of the rare, singular, and sought-after artworks included in the event’s silent and live auctions.

 

For the fourth consecutive year, the ArtCrush main event (Friday, August 2) will be held at AAM community partner Aspen Skiing Company’s renowned Buttermilk ski area—the longstanding home for the annual ESPN Winter X Games. In addition to the presentation of the Aspen Award for Art to Lisa Yuskavage, the evening’s events include a seated dinner and the event’s renowned silent and live ArtCrush art auctions featuring works donated by some of the international contemporary art world’s most important gallerists and artists. For the eighth consecutive year, Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Senior International Specialist, Contemporary Art and Chairman, Europe, will conduct the evening’s main-stage live auction. The dinner and auction event is followed by live entertainment and dancing at AfterPartyCrush at Belly Up Aspen, featuring the Bloom Twins.

 

The 2019 list of distinguished guests is scheduled to include: Rita and Jeffrey Adler, Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm, Belinda Louise Diacui Badcock and Carlos Alves De Brito, Jill and Jay Bernstein, Nancy and Clint Carlson, Rebecca and Troy Carter, Rona and Jeffrey Citrin, Nancy and Steve Crown, Eleanore and Domenico De Sole, Marcy and Leo Edelstein, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Richard Edwards, Marilyn and Larry Fields, Sherry and Joseph Felson, Barbara and Michael Gamson, Gabriela and Ramiro Garza, Lori and Bruce Gendelman, Kitzia and Richard Goodman, Jan and Ronald Greenberg, Sally and Steve Hansen, Holly Hunt, Chandra and Jimmie Johnson, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Erin Leider-Pariser and Paul Pariser, Toby Devan Lewis, Warren Lichtenstein, Karen and Courtney Lord, Nicola and Jeff Marcus, Susan and Larry Marx, Mona and Tony Mazza, Denise Monteleone and Jim Martin, Amy and John Phelan, Cecilia and Ernesto Poma, Carolyn Powers, Allen and Kelli Questrom, Katie and Amnon Rodan, Nancy and Richard Rogers, Michelle and Jason Rubell, Sabrina Leichter Rudin and Michael Rudin, Ali and Lew Sanders, June and Paul Schorr, Maria and Bill Smithburg, Gayle Stoffel, Wendi Sturgis, Sandra and Tony Tamer, Jamie Tisch, Sharon and Michael Young and Mary and Harold Zlot. Confirmed ArtCrush 2019 artist attendees include (subject to change): Marc Dennis, Nir Hod, Rodney McMillian, Oscar Murillo, Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, Ken Solomon, Fred Tomaselli, and Nari Ward.

 

ArtCrush 2019 sponsors include (subject to change): J.P. Morgan, Sotheby’s, and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits. Additional support: Artsy, Aspen Skiing Company, Baldwin Gallery, Belly Up Aspen, Bethel Party Rentals, Casterline | Goodman Gallery, Halcyon Productions, Jay’s Valet, Pink Monkey Solutions, Ship/Art Terry Dowd, and Zkipster. 2019 WineCrush and ArtCrush event design elements are once again overseen and implemented by the AAM’s longstanding design partners and consultants Chris Stone and David Fox of New York–based architectural and design firm Stonefox in consultation with the museum and ArtCrush Event Chair Amy Phelan. For more information about ArtCrush, visit: aspenartmuseum.org/artcrush

 

 

Lisa Yuskavage (b. Philadelphia, 1962) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, (1984), and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art (1986).  For more than thirty years, Yuskavage’s approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre as she has combined art historical, popular culture, and fantastical references through her rendering of simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters that assume the dual roles of subject and object, complicating their reception and viewership. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in numerous institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2000); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011); and the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts (2015). Her works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Long Museum, Shanghai; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

 

August 2019 represents the fifth anniversary of the AAM’s opening of its landmark Shigeru Ban–designed building. In celebration of this momentous occasion—and, as a part of the year-long observation of the Aspen Art Museum’s forty-year anniversary as a public institution—the museum will present twenty-four hours of programming that echoes its opening debut weekend of 2014, and include a full spectrum of artist talks and performances, oral histories from founders and community members, a lecture by AAM-architect Shigeru Ban, workshops for all ages, a dance party, midnight film screening, sleepover, sunrise yoga, and more.

 

ON VIEW AT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM

 

Collecting fragments of contemporary existence, sculptor and installation artist Gabriel Rico recontextualizes familiar objects and materials in ways that convey the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Influenced by scientific approaches, geometry, and philosophy, Rico creates non-mathematical equations from objects that reflect our fundamental struggle to achieve balance. Rico’s AAM exhibition features new work that fuses the natural and kitsch in a response to the architecture of the museum’s ground floor galleries.

 

Each day is a whole world brings together eleven works by poet and artist Etel Adnan, who, through her use of large squares of abstract color and strong lines, creates small-format paintings and large-scale tapestries that address the enduring persistence of landscape on the human condition. In the seventies, Adnan (now a resident of Paris), moved just north of San Francisco, where she became so enamored by the nearby mountain, Mount Tamalpais, that it remains her central subject to this day. Spanning two galleries, the small collection of works in Each day is a whole world offers a poignant meditation on how the places we both occupy and encounter become the means through which we understand our place in the world.

 

Walter Price: We Passed Like Ships in the Night

For We passed like ships in the night, New York–based artist Walter Price presents a selection of seven paintings created during his time as an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island, Rauschenberg’s home for over thirty-five years. Embracing Captiva for the creation of new work, Price painted a series of intimately scaled works that blend abstraction and representation, offering viewers his ruminations on this specific place, as well as providing a poetic reminder of how we use symbols and memory to construct a sense of our collective cultural landscape.

 

Grounded in the everyday and deriving her sources from ordinary objects, Erika Verzutti creates unique, hybrid objects that playfully fuse the real and the fantastical. Her ambiguous sculptures take on anthropomorphic qualities through exploration of materials and the embrace of elements of chance and tactility. Verzutti’s Venus Yogini is a large-scale bronze Venus—an extension of her recent smaller sculptures incorporating organic forms—depicting the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility.

 

Engaging ideas at the intersection of sculpture, architectural infrastructure, political activism, and public space, Oscar Tuazon applies industrial materials to construct large-scale, minimalist installations that address themes of community, ecology, and the built environment among other issues. For Fire Worship, the Los Angeles–based artist has created a temporary concrete fire pit that conflates the space of a stage with that of a fireplace. The piece serves various functions: as a gathering place for audiences to sit and interact—with each other as well as with the work itself—as a small monument, and as an outdoor heater in Aspen’s cooler months.

 

Since the 1960s, Swiss artist John Armleder has been at the forefront of numerous key developments in postwar art. Often operating at the intersection of pattern, decoration, and kitsch, Armleder’s diverse body of work has consistently challenged the traditional demarcations between high and low art. His AAM exhibition will focus on two of the artist’s iconic painting series—his Pour Paintings and Puddle Paintings—in which Armleder utilizes process-based approaches that echo the works and techniques of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Larry Poons.

 

Renowned for challenging assumptions often present in collective notions of blackness, Rashid Johnson is among an influential, core group of American artists whose work employs a wide range of materials, media, and images to explore art history, literature, philosophy, and, ultimately, both personal and cultural identity. His summer 2019 AAM solo exhibition—presented in partnership with Museo Tamayo in Mexico City—will feature three new collage-based works alongside already existing works, as well as a new major commissioned installation with live performative and video elements, including Johnson's first choreographic work involving ballet and modern movement—a collaboration between the artist and renowned New York–based choreographer Claudia Schreier.

 

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The Aspen Art Museum is a non-collecting institution presenting the newest, most important evolutions in international contemporary art. Our innovative and timely exhibitions, education and public programs, immersive activities, and community happenings actively engage audiences in thought-provoking experiences of art, culture, and society.

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Tuesday–Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM

Closed Mondays

 

AAM ADMISSION IS FREE courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

Visit the AAM online: aspenartmuseum.org

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