Aspen’s Bold New Festival Challenges Everything You Thought About Art—and Crisis—Prepare to Have Your Mind Blown!
What if weaving isn’t just about threads and patterns, but a whole way of seeing the world? For Frida Escobedo, that’s exactly the case. This Mexican architect, who’s juggling huge projects like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tang Wing and a major overhaul of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, doesn’t just build buildings — she weaves stories, cultures, and histories into her designs. Inspired by the celosía, the traditional Mexican breeze wall that lets the outside in, Escobedo’s work is a masterclass in creating spaces that hold tension and difference without erasing them. It’s that “interlacing of pressures and desires” she spoke about at the AIR festival in Aspen, where creatives from all walks came together to challenge, argue, and spark fresh ideas. So, the question is: in a world buzzing with conflicting forces, can architecture—and art—really be the loom that binds us together?
For Frida Escobedo, weaving is both a physical and conceptual tool that defines her practice. Currently, the Mexican architect is designing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tang Wing and is also spearheading the five-year renovation of Paris’s Centre Pompidou alongside Franco-Japanese duo Moreau Kusunoki. On one hand, Escobedo’s interest in porous screens and structures that invite the outside in is derivative of the celosía, a traditional Mexican breeze wall. But more broadly, the architect, known for her inclusive and timeless designs, calls weaving a “worldview.”
Describing her architecture’s “interlacing of pressures and desires” at the Aspen Institute on July 31 during the inaugural AIR festival, Escobedo said, “It’s about bringing different forces together, social, environmental, historical. They create some tension and repetition, but it’s not about erasing differences, but rather to create structure around it.”
AIR— short for “Art in Relation”—is the Aspen Art Museum’s new landmark initiative, which is described as a year-round program “designed to explore the role of art in addressing the questions and complexities of our time through interdisciplinary collaborations, conversations, and site-specific artworks and performances.” Its first edition culminated in a private retreat of leading artists and thinkers, followed by a multi-venue public festival of talks, installations, and performances from July 29 to August 1. The lineup was as eclectic as it was visionary. Festival participants included German filmmaker Werner Herzog, The Studio Museum in Harlem Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker, and singer and songwriter Caroline Polachek. With conversations and artworks exploring topics as capacious as consciousness, community, time, and technology, it was difficult to pinpoint AIR’s precise theme or mission (though AIR 2025 takes its title from Walker’s 2024 book, Life As No One Knows It). Instead, what united the diverse roster of multi-hyphenate talent may best be described as Escobedo’s weaving-as-worldview ethos — and an undeniable proclivity for big ideas.
Caroline Polachek performing at AIR 2025.
“AIR is a jam session, where creatives from different disciplines can get together and trade information, argue, disagree, and perhaps, through collective thought, develop something new,” Glenn Ligon told Harper’s Bazaar. In addition to speaking with his close friend and collaborator Golden during AIR, the renowned conceptual artist was the recipient of ArtCrush’s 2025 Lewis Family Art Award (ArtCrush is the Aspen Art Museum’s annual fundraising gala, which, now in its 20th year, has helped cement the mountain town as an art-world destination each summer). This December, Ligon will also have a solo exhibition at the museum.
At AIR’s core is a fierce conviction that artists are leaders. “I think artists have antennae that receive signals from the future; the best artists use their work to interpret and make sense of those signals,” said Ligon, whose poignant text-based paintings and sculptures have always confronted issues of race and sexuality. “Often, artists see where a society is going more clearly than those in other fields, and our job is also to visualize this future. It is very easy to imagine what we don’t want the future to look like, but hard to imagine what we wish it would look like.”
Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden at AIR Festival 2025.
Ligon and fellow artist and writer Aria Dean voiced how artists and creatives rarely get to ideate in an expanded way. “Art fairs are usually the place where you run into everyone, but they’re not really a space for critical discourse,” Dean told Harper’s Bazaar after her conversation with Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, at AIR. As a member of the initiative’s artist council, Dean helped design and facilitate the three-day closed-door retreat, composed of 35 leaders from the arts, humanities, policy, and more (including several of AIR’s public-facing participants). Workshops focused on generating conversations around how art and technology can be applied to help solve some of today’s most pressing issues, such as climate change and the frightening potential of increasingly intelligent machines — subjects further explored at the festival. “My work often explores the long arc of history and ideas, and that’s something that feels very present throughout AIR’s program,” said Dean. “You only get that when you have people from different disciplines in the same space.”
In constructing AIR, Nicola Lees, the Aspen Art Museum’s Artistic Director and CEO, and a team of curators, including AIR curator-at-large Vic Brooks, privileged an interdisciplinary approach that harnessed Aspen’s distinctive intellectual history. From 1951 through 2006, the International Design Conference brought the world’s greatest minds, from Susan Sontag to Steve Jobs, to Aspen. Today, the week-long Aspen Ideas Festival—the Aspen Institute’s flagship event—similarly offers attendees the chance to learn from prominent figures in intimate settings across the Institute’s campus, where many of AIR’s talks also took place. “As a contemporary art museum, we wanted to think about what the museum can be in the present and what it should be thinking about in the future,” said Lees. Lees noted that because the Aspen Art Museum is not anchored by a physical collection, its recent off-site activations, for example, installations by artists Cauleen Smith (2022) and Matt Copson (2023) inside Smuggler Mine, a former silver mine, have paved the way for AIR.
Mimi Park’s work at AIR Festival 2025
In addition to the museum’s current exhibitions dedicated to three powerhouse female artists (Sherrie Levine, Solange Pessoa, and Carol Rama), festival attendees could venture from the Aspen Center for Physics — where South Korean interdisciplinary artist Mimi Park created a large starburst-like floor painting featuring glitter, rhinestones, and more small found objects — to the picturesque Hallam Lake Nature Preserve, where Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Jota Mombaça staged a three-act opera. As viewers journeyed around the preserve, guided by a small group of performers, another performer simultaneously covered a seated Mombaça in red clay. AIR’s hottest ticket in town was a live performance by artist and film director Matthew Barney at McCabe Ranch on July 30. Set inside a riding arena and former drill hall of the 10th Mountain Division infantry, characters, stories, and motifs from the artist’s recent bodies of work (think hunters, huskies, and athletes, plus an equal-parts unnerving and glamorous show-tune chanteuse) converged in a theatrical performance conceived specifically for the rugged Colorado setting.
Jota Mombaça’s The Muted Saints at AIR Festival 2025.
Like the festival’s installations, performances, and conversations, artists’ unique power lies in their ability to “provoke different ways of thinking,” said Lees. “It was very interesting to start AIR at Aspen Chapel with [filmmaker and artist] Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s piece, On Blue, followed by [artist and death doula] P. Staff and [psychoanalyst and writer] Jamieson Webster’s beautiful, yet intense, conversation around existence and death, while the next day, [artist and writer] Paul Chan was able to have that conversation in a completely different way.” In one of AIR’s most fascinating presentations, Chan demonstrated the latest version of Paul′, a digital “synthetic self-portrait” that he has been developing since 2018 to explore the capabilities and limitations of machine learning. Chan asked Paul′—who was built to respond as Chan himself would—a series of questions ranging from “are you alive?” to the nostalgic early chatbot trope, “are you flirting with me?”
Maya Lin
As cultural communicators, artists also possess a gift for “making the invisible visible,” as Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist described while conversing with keynote speaker Maya Lin. Lin, who presented at the 1983 International Design Conference (the same year that Jobs gave his iconic talk on a then-nascent Apple), discussed her career as an architect, earth artist, and climate change activist. She revealed her poetic fountain design for the future the Barack Obama Presidential Center for the first time, though what was most resonant about her AIR presentation was her directness in conveying environmental urgency. Having famously designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., while still a Yale undergraduate student, Lin spoke of her ongoing memorial work, including what she considers her fifth and final one, What is Missing? This multi-sited series of both permanent sculptures and temporary exhibits, as well as a website of the same name, focuses on highlighting species that have gone extinct or are likely to within our lifetime.
In her speech, Lin additionally advocated for numerous nature-based solutions, ranging from individual efforts — asking people to consider eating 20% less beef, for example — to suggesting the government reallocate a small amount of its investment in space exploration to protecting the land on Earth. At the end of her keynote, Lin homed in on art’s unparalleled capacity to communicate the issues of our time: “What if art can propose new ways of looking at the crisis we face and help us imagine how we could help shape a different future?”
At AIR, the answer to Lin’s question wasn’t hypothetical—it was already beginning to take shape.
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