As the art world descends on Aspen for the Aspen Art Fair this week, Hotel Jerome’s historic revolving doors are expected to see a steady stream of collectors, curators, and creatives. But beyond the fair’s white-walled booths, a series of thoughtful exhibitions across town are exploring timely themes of memory, home, and nature—offering a quieter, more reflective counterpoint to the buzz. A short walk away, the Aspen Art Museum offers a meditative counterpoint to the fair’s frenzy. Housed in Shigeru Ban’s iconic glass-and-wood structure, the museum features four exhibitions, including Solange Pessoa, a survey of Sherrie Levine’s early work and a rare American showing of Carol Rama, whose raw, surrealist images were shaped by life under fascism.
Mariposa Gallery brings contemporary art into an unexpected venue: Alderfer Antiques, where “Another Man’s Treasure” reframes found objects and forgotten histories as living material. It’s a show about reimagining the past in real time. Nearby, Casterline Goodman Gallery presents Lisa Kinzelberg who reflects on place and memory through abstracted city maps. These quiet, grounding works offer a pause, a chance to reconnect with time, space, and fleeting moments.
Another Man’s Treasure
Mariposa Gallery
Alderfer Antiques
Courtesy of Mariposa Gallery.
Courtesy of Mariposa Gallery.
This summer, the group exhibition “Another Man’s Treasure” is housed at Alderfer’s Antiques, a late 19th-century miner’s cabin on Main Street in Aspen, Colorado. Visitors enter a space where contemporary artworks are woven among Western memorabilia, pioneer artifacts, and Wild West nostalgia. With works by Casey Bolding, Drake Carr, Alessandro Teoldi, and others, the show raises questions of value, authenticity, and the pull of the past.
By placing contemporary art among antiques, the exhibition reminds us that beauty often lives in the overlooked—and that inspiration can emerge from the most unexpected places. There’s power in transforming the discarded into something treasured. Featuring multigenerational artists, the show doesn’t just reference the past—it reframes it, extending the life of old forms and revealing how much of the new is born from what came before.
What We Love: The estate of John Boskovich (1956-2006) has loaned two rarely seen works: Untitled (Navajo Rug with Ginsberg Text) and Color Correction Series / AA Bumper Stickers: Reality – What A Concept.
“Another Man’s Treasure” at Alderfer Antiques
July 11–August 3, 2025
Lisa Kinzelberg: Cities of the World
Casterline Goodman Gallery
611 E Cooper Ave.
Courtesy of Lisa Kinzelberg.
Lisa Kinzelberg’s “Cities of the World” series at Casterline Goodman Gallery, offers a fresh take on mapmaking through a deeply personal lens. In this body of work, Kinzelberg draws from her travels and lived experiences across different cities to reimagine urban landscapes. Her aim is to capture not just geography, but the rhythm, atmosphere, and emotional texture of each place. Each piece begins with an abstract oil underpainting, layered with colors that might evoke local flora, terrain, or even an old advertisement. Anchoring every work is an aerial perspective, reminiscent of that first fleeting view from a plane window.
Over this expressive base, Kinzelberg adds recognizable elements—parks, roads, lakes, landmarks—that give the city its physical form. But her maps remain deliberately open-ended. Rather than dictating what matters, she invites viewers to bring their own memories and meanings, to consider what “home” looks like through their own lens.
What We Love: On view are two distinct interpretations of Aspen—one, rendered in greens, oranges, and yellows, celebrates the city’s natural contours and landscapes, the other, in muted tones, shifts the focus to infrastructure, roads, and the quiet geometry of human design. Together, they offer a layered portrait of the city.
Lisa Kinzelberg at Casterline Goodman Gallery
July 20–September 25, 2025
Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988
Aspen Art Museum
637 E Hyman Ave.
Courtesy of Aspen Art Museum. Photos by Daniel Pérez.
One of the current exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum is “Sherrie Levine: 1977–1988,” a focused survey of the first eleven years of the artist’s career. Sherrie Levine’s work investigates how identity is shaped through our relationships with images and forms. Like many artists of the 1970s and 1980s, she explored a wide range of media, including photography, painting, collage, and sculpture.
Levine’s early practice centered less on mass media iconography and more on the language of art history. By reappropriating the works of artists like Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee, she challenges the idea of a fixed artistic narrative, disrupting its authority and reshaping it within a contemporary context.
As Levine said, “I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides, so there is an easy flow between the past and future, between my history and yours.”
What We Love: The exhibition features five of Levine’s Knot Paintings, a striking series in which she paints only the knot patches on sheets of plywood, where ultimately nature becomes a collaborator.
Sherrie Levine at Aspen Art Museum
June 6–September 29, 2025
Solange Pessoa: Catch the sun with your hand
Aspen Art Museum
637 E Hyman Ave.
Installation view, Solange Pessoa: Catch the sun with your hand at Aspen Art Museum. Photo by Paul Salveson
Situated on both the rooftop and lower level of the Aspen Art Museum are four sculptural works created by Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa over the past five years. Known for her evocative and poetic practice, Pessoa explores the intersections between nature and the human body. Her work is deeply influenced by the landscape of Minas Gerais, Brazil—a region shaped by mining, where the raw earth is continually exposed and reimagined.
Pessoa’s dreamlike installations, sculptures, and paintings invite viewers to consider the relationship between memory and matter. Often taking years to complete, her installations are never truly finished. Their organic, evolving nature means each exhibition site alters their meaning, like cells evolving in nature or sediment shifting over time.
“My work is about time. The slow time of matter. Not human time—geological time, memory in the form of sediment,” Pessoa said.
What We Love: On the museum rooftop, NIHIL NOVI SUB SOLE features several carved soapstones. The warm beige and cool grey tones of the sculptures contrast beautifully with the surrounding green mountains, subtly echoing the terrain of Minas Gerais.
Solange Pessoa at Aspen Art Museum
July 2–October 26, 2025
Carol Rama: THE TONGUE, THE EYE, THE FOOT
Aspen Art Museum
637 E Hyman Ave.
Installation view, Carol Rama: THE TONGUE, THE EYE, THE FOOT, 2025. Photo by Daniel Pérez. Courtesy of Aspen Art Museum.
The late Italian artist Carol Rama (1918–2015) created a body of work that spans over seventy years, offering a deeply personal and provocative reflection of both her life and the cultural shifts of the 20th century. This selection of works focuses on the body as a site of fantasy, vulnerability, and resistance, featuring pieces created between the 1930s and the 1980s.
Rama’s early drawings often depict nude women adorned only with shoes and their tongues extended provocatively. Snakes emerge in the background, interacting with the figures in ways that feel both intimate and unsettling. These images reflect the psychological and emotional weight of her upbringing in a bourgeois family in fascist Italy.
In the 1960s, Rama began creating assemblage works using unconventional materials such as bodily fluids. Her use of eye motifs and human-like forms evoke the unrest and political tension of the era. Some figures seem to pierce through the surface of the work, confronting the viewer with a raw, psychosexual energy.
What We Love: Rama refused to align herself with any single artistic movement, though her work brushes up against ideas from Arte Povera and assemblage. The works stand as powerful expressions of individuality.
Carol Rama at Aspen Art Museum
June 6–September 7, 2025
Anthea Hamilton: Cauliflower Sundial
Aspen Art Museum
637 E Hyman Ave.
Anthea Hamilton, in collaboration with LOEWE, Giant Pumpkin No.1, 2022. Hand-painted leather, foam, timber, metal fixings. 130 x 207 x 170 cm. Courtesy the artist and M HKA. Photo: Kristien Daem
This summer, the Aspen Art Museum debuts a new outdoor sculpture by Anthea Hamilton, commissioned specifically for the Museum Commons. The work expands on her Giant Pumpkins series, originally created in collaboration with LOEWE.
Crafted from industrial cast aluminum, the sculpture contrasts sharply with the soft, organic forms of the vegetable that inspired it. At its apex sits a sundial—merging nature and technology in a poetic gesture. The brain-like contours and timekeeping dials suggest a reflection on the ways we measure time, memory, and perception.
Larger than life, the sculpture transforms an ordinary, perishable vegetable into something theatrical and enigmatic. Up close, its surface recalls the folds of a human brain—evoking the idea of a mind continuously absorbing the noise of pop culture.
What We Love: Unlike Hamilton’s previous projects, which often engage visitors, Cauliflower Sundial responds instead to nature itself. Here, the choreography is set by light, shadow, and the Earth’s rotation—turning the sculpture into a living, temporal experience.
Anthea Hamilton at Aspen Art Museum
Summer 2025–Ongoing
