ASPEN ART MUSEUM TO REOPEN ON JULY 1, 2020

 

For immediate release

 

ASPEN, COLORADO (June 30, 2020) — The Aspen Art Museum will reopen to the public on July 1, 2020. This date also marks the opening of where i am and was, the first solo museum exhibition of British painter Rose Wylie in the US. Originally scheduled to open in March 2020, this exhibition will remain on view to the public until November 1, 2020.

 

Two outdoor sculpture installations, the openings of which were postponed due to the coronavirus, will now also be open to the public: Maren Hassinger’s site-specific work Nature, Sweet Nature in the Roof Deck Sculpture Garden and Kelly Akashi’s Cultivator in the Crown Commons.

 

The museum has also extended two current exhibitions: Oscar Murillo’s Social Altitude (open through September 28, 2020) and Lisa Yuskavage’s Wilderness (open through October 18, 2020).

 

The museum will welcome the public with extensive health and safety measures in place to protect both staff and visitors. Visitor traffic will be regulated to 25 percent of capacity throughout the building in compliance with Aspen City & County requirements at the present time. Hourly entries will be limited to fifty people, and group party sizes limited to six people. While walk-in visitors will be permitted as capacity allows, the AAM strongly recommends reservations to ensure visitation—entry can be pre-booked via the museum website at no charge.

 

All visitors and staff will be required to wear face masks, and there will be hand sanitizing stations on each floor, as well as at the entrance and exit of the museum. Traffic in the galleries will be one-way, and there will be designated paths in some areas to ensure a minimum of six-feet physical distancing at all times.

 

The museum’s SO Café will also be open for lunch from 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m., Tuesday–Saturday, with limited capacity table service available by reservation for parties of six people or fewer. Weekly menus and café guidelines are available on the AAM website.

 

The first public evening event scheduled as part of the museum reopening features cultural partner Jazz Aspen Snowmass, whose annual JAS Café Summer Series will launch with evening performances on both July 10 and 11 in the open-air Level 3 space. Tickets are limited to fifty people per show with two performances each evening. The series is generously hosted by Nancy Magoon and Kelli & Allen Questrom.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

 

For all PRESS inquiries, please contact Rees & Co:

Rosanna Hawkins | [email protected] | +44 (0)7910 092 634

 

Within Colorado, please contact:

Jeff Murcko | [email protected] | +1 303 910 1163

 

FURTHER PROGRAM INFORMATION

 

Kelly Akashi: Cultivator

July 1, 2020–March 14, 2021

Crown Commons

 

Cultivator consists of a larger-than-life bronze cast of the artist’s own hand, overgrown with glass flowers and vines. These glass pieces reference flora local to the Roaring Fork Valley, such as the heartleaf arnica (arnica cordifolia). Cultivator will also mark a site-specific engagement with nature, as the installation will incorporate plants from the Crown Commons during Aspen’s warmer seasons. Kelly Akashi is a Los Angeles–based artist who often draws from her own body and is known for using materials such as glass, bronze, wax, concrete, water, rope, and marble to investigate their material and gestural possibilities.

 

Maren Hassinger: Nature, Sweet Nature

July 1, 2020–March 14, 2021

Roof Deck Sculpture Garden

 

Nature, Sweet Nature features two distinct wire and concrete works––Garden and Paradise Regained––which mimic the plant life in the museum’s open-air Level 3 environment. Maren Hassinger is known for exploring nature and movement in commanding sculptures that juxtapose the natural and industrial worlds––galvanized wire ropes resemble reeds, grasses, and other vegetation. Garden––installed in the museum’s permanent roof deck planters––presents a large, wild vine amid decorative flowers and bushes. Its scale will seem to evade its containment, and purposefully complicate the normally unrestricted view of Aspen Mountain experienced in the space. Paradise Regained consists of thick wire strands standing in rows like planted grasses or reeds, and leaning as if bent by the wind.

 

Oscar Murillo: Social Altitude

Through September 28, 2020

Gallery 1

 

Murillo’s Social Altitude features newly executed works in a host of media, including large-scale paintings and drawings executed in Brazil, China, Colombia, Germany, Israel, Kenya, and Turkey, and a new video work shot in Aspen in 2019. Known for a diverse body of work that uses his own personal experiences as a point of departure, Murillo is intent on explorations of the conditions and dynamics of globalization and cultural exchange. Through a wide-ranging, itinerant, and globally expansive practice, Murillo continues to make powerful and timely social and political observations that speak to the world around us.

Rose Wylie: where i am and was

July 1–November 1, 2020

Galleries 2 & 3

 

This debut US solo museum exhibition of British artist Rose Wylie features fourteen monumental paintings created between the late 1990s and the present day alongside the largest collection of her drawings, concept sketches, and ephemera ever to be exhibited—with some works never having been exhibited before. Finding inspiration in newspapers, art history, advertisements, and films, Wylie deploys a distinctive visual language defined by bold colors, stylized figures, and the interplay of image and text to investigate such timely concerns as the power of celebrity and the representation of women in visual culture.

 

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

Through October 18, 2020

Galleries 4, 5, & 6

 

This exhibition, co-organized by the Aspen Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art, focuses on Lisa Yuskavage’s landscape paintings. Yuskavage creates ethereal, fantastical scenes populated with predominantly female nude figures that are at once exhibitionist and introspective. This exhibition seeks to look beyond the eroticism of her figures to examine the artist’s outdoor scenes. Grounded in familiar terrain, they are almost otherworldly with a supernatural force permeating their vistas. Yuskavage explores ideas around myth and fiction as they manifest in our surroundings, lending a sense of the romantic and the seductive to the everyday.

 

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ABOUT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM

Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a thriving and globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the museum’s new facility designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban, the AAM enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the AAM was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley communities and its fostering of learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the museum’s Aspen location.

 

Museum hours

Tuesday–Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM

Closed Mondays

The café will operate reduced opening hours, 11:30 AM–3 PM

 

AAM ADMISSION IS FREE courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

Visit the AAM online: aspenartmuseum.org

 

 

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