How Nicola Lees Recentered the Aspen Art Museum Around Artists Instead of Objects

Since her appointment as artistic director and CEO of the Aspen Art Museum in 2020, Nicola Lees has put the museum on the path to becoming one of the country’s most dynamic contemporary art institutions, anchored by an ambitious exhibition program and initiatives such as AIR, a 10-year “Artists in Relation” initiative supporting context-specific artists’ commissions and projects. Under her guidance, the museum has mounted major exhibitions and commissions involving artists including Precious Okoyomon, Andy Warhol, Nairy Baghramian, Hervé Télémaque, Allison Katz and Ryan Trecartin. Admission to the museum has remained free, supported by philanthropist art collectors Amy and John Phelan.

ArtCrush is not only the museum’s largest fundraiser, supporting exhibitions and education programs, but also one of the most well-attended and successful fundraising events in the country, reportedly raising more than $4 million. Ahead of this year’s gala, the culminating moment of an increasingly expansive Aspen ArtWeek, Observer spoke with Lees to learn more about her initial vision, how it has evolved and how the museum’s achievements and improvements are being reflected in the local community and its increasingly attractive art scene, despite Aspen’s remote location and relative distance from major international art hubs.

Lees stepped into her role just as the pandemic began, and that period taught her how much a museum can hold during uncertain times. “As timelines shifted, we adopted a more fluid approach, supporting artists not only to present work but also to return, revise, and remain in dialogue,” she told Observer, pointing to Precious Okoyomon and Jonathan Berger’s recent interventions as examples of this expanded sense of time and presence.

Precious Okoyomon’s Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty was a constantly evolving eco-installation, a living ecosystem developed over roughly 18 months, with plants, sculptures, sound, performance and communal activity taking over the museum’s rooftop from June 2021 through September 2022.

Jonathan Berger’s The Store completely transformed the museum shop into a hybrid exhibition, archive, gathering place and functioning commercial space. Presented from December 2020 through March 2022, it featured more than 350 objects, ranging from contemporary art and design to jewelry, textiles, toys, furniture, fragrances, ceramics, folk art, household goods, found materials and mass-produced objects. Some were not for sale, while others ranged in price from free to $50,000, making art collecting accessible to all. The work was also an extensive collaborative platform, spotlighting and providing a new distribution channel for many local producers and creative entrepreneurs. BODE produced garments using hand-loomed textiles from Glenwood Springs Mountain Valley Weavers, perfumer Trygve Harris created a new collection using Enfleurage essential oils, Julie Tolentino designed a sculptural counter and Ramdasha produced a soundtrack. Other contributors ranged from local makers and community organizations to figures and estates associated with Isamu Noguchi, Sister Corita Kent, Comme des Garçons, Vaginal Davis and Michael Stipe. “Aspen’s geography, remote yet globally connected, has proved a strength,” according to Lees. “We have embraced the museum’s role as both a retreat and a resonant voice in an international conversation.”

Her priorities, she added, have not changed, though they have deepened. Integral to her approach is placing artists at the center, fostering in-person dialogue and cultivating a museum defined by atmosphere and lasting impact. Before Lees came to Aspen, she knew about its cultural history, from the International Design Conference to the remarkable artists, architects, writers and thinkers drawn there over the decades. An artist-founded, non-collecting museum in the Rockies seemed full of possibilities for reactivating and casting new light on that creative history and community. She saw in it a place that could invest in exhibitions, artists, conversations and new ways of working together.

“I often return to the period when Aspen briefly existed an hour ahead of the rest of Colorado, the title of a book by my predecessor Dean Sobel,” she said. “It remains a fitting metaphor for the museum’s founding spirit: slightly out of sync and slightly elsewhere, with permission to do things differently.”

The Aspen Art Museum is an artist-founded, non-collecting institution, established in 1979 and among the few of its kind in the United States. Lees has placed a strong emphasis on creating opportunities for artistic production, often through projects that respond directly to Aspen and its community. “Without a collection, we can focus our resources on ambitious exhibitions, live and educational programs, both in our Shigeru Ban-designed building and across Aspen itself, from the center of town to the surrounding landscape,” she explained, noting how that freedom has allowed the museum to develop projects that respond directly to the region, from Cauleen Smith’s film program and Matt Copson’s multimedia installation in Smuggler Mine in 2022 and 2023 to Ryan Trecartin’s collaborative AUDIENCE PLANT 2024 performance on Aspen Mountain.

The AIR initiative, Lees says, grew naturally from that way of working, creating the time and space for artists to develop ideas deeply rooted in the place while contributing to broader cultural conversations. “Our identity is not anchored to a physical collection. Instead, our legacy lives in the relationships, dialogue, and exchange that each project generates, locally and beyond Aspen,” she emphasized. “Every exhibition and live program leaves a lasting imprint on the museum and helps it evolve. As Allison Katz often recalls, Emily Dickinson’s words, ‘It is finished,’ can never be said of us.”

ArtCrush, meanwhile, has become one of the most prominent gatherings on the international summer art calendar, attracting a global audience and raising millions of dollars each year. Asked about the secret behind its success, Lees attributes it to the event’s ability to remain coherent with the museum’s artist-centered mission. Notably, artists retain a share of the proceeds from their auctioned works, directing support back to their practices, something that is not always the case at museum benefit auctions and is certainly not typical of contemporary art auctions more broadly. Ahead of the auction, all works are exhibited at the museum for two weeks, creating a moment of public engagement and an introduction to the local community while providing participating artists with important institutional visibility.

The timing is also significant: ArtCrush comes immediately after AIR, which was conceived as a long-term commitment to artists, research and collaboration, so the celebration grows naturally out of a week shaped by artistic exchange. “The festival is its most visible expression, but the real value lies in artists returning, ideas developing over time, and collaborations growing in unexpected ways within this high-alpine landscape,” Lees observed.

This year, ArtCrush is honoring pioneering Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas with the Lewis Family Award for Art, in conjunction with his ambitious exhibition currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum through April 11, 2027. Taking over two floors, the show draws on the geological history of the place to create a cavernous, imaginative environment that deepens his ongoing investigation of deep time, ecological decay and the possibility of a post- or beyond-human era.

Confronting the finitude and limits of human intelligence and the failure of our “Capitalocene,” Villar Rojas reflects on human hubris, contemplating and revealing how the universe’s complexity far exceeds our cognitive scale and any anthropocentric construction of human history. “When I began thinking about the impossibility of going beyond that horizon, I found myself arriving at the confines of human existence itself. What happens when art reaches its end, not stylistically, but ontologically? That question became a kind of fault line for me—an intuition that if I wanted to move forward, I had to step outside the human timeline altogether,” he told Observer in a recent interview.

Within this narrative environment, a new life-size Triceratops skull imagines a prehistoric encounter between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as an early exchange of meaning and image-making, challenging anthropocentric ideas of human exceptionalism. This ambitious sculpture was co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the contemporary art foundation affiliated with the luxury watch brand. Lees has notably secured significant cross-industry partnerships with brands such as Bottega Veneta, Prada and Audemars Piguet, some of which have directly supported the production of major exhibitions and other museum programming.

These collaborations have emerged at a moment when it is increasingly clear that the art world could benefit from, and in many cases needs, the resources and reach of the luxury sector, while luxury brands look to contemporary art for cultural relevance and long-term engagement with their audiences. Recent examples include Louis Vuitton staging a fashion show at the Frick Collection, Jonathan Anderson drawing inspiration from Lynda Benglis for his latest Dior show and Loro Piana staging an advertising campaign inside the iconic Rothko Chapel and at sites associated with the Menil Collection in Houston, among many others.

“The most meaningful partnerships are aligned in purpose as well as spirit. They provide the long-term support that enables artists and institutions to realize ambitious work, while offering partners a genuine connection to contemporary culture, the artists, and the particular context of Aspen,” Lees asserted, adding that for the museum, the structure is always collaborative and project-led. “Co-commissions can create the right conditions for research, production, and presentation without compromising artistic ambition. The strongest relationships, with partners such as Bottega Veneta and Prada, are grounded in a shared commitment to artists and a substantive engagement with the art world, rather than visibility alone.”

The key, she emphasized, is to seek partners whose values, curiosity and ways of working are genuinely aligned with the museum’s mission. Lees points to ZEGNA’s longstanding dialogue with fashion, environment and art, which is especially resonant in Aspen, where the relationship between culture and the natural landscape is so immediate: “That is what makes a partnership meaningful: it supports the work itself while creating a considered, lasting exchange between artists, audiences, and partners.”

Even Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s support of the Villar Rojas exhibition was a natural co-commission, Lees explained, describing it as a collaborative process that extended from research through fabrication. First presented in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, where Audemars Piguet is rooted, the work is now resurfacing among another set of mountains as a fossil connecting extinction with the origins of non-human symbolic histories.

Meanwhile, a new work by Arte Povera master Michelangelo Pistoletto, White Curtain (2026), will be offered in this year’s ArtCrush auction, courtesy of the artist and his relationship with ZEGNA. Pistoletto and his father, the artist Ettore Olivero Pistoletto, have been part of the brand’s creative history for nearly a century.

Lees describes the 2026 edition of AIR as a natural continuation of everything the museum has been building so far. Yet what excites her most this year is seeing ideas that began as conversations continue to take on new forms: “One of AIR’s ambitions has always been to build relationships over time, and this year’s program really reflects that.” Matthew Barney, for example, is returning with a new sculptural commission that grew out of last summer’s performance, while Adrián Villar Rojas returns with a transformative exhibition at the museum following his participation in AIR last year.

“I’m also excited by the breadth of this year’s program,” she said. “Across performances, exhibitions, talks, and more, artists are approaching the idea of landscape from very different perspectives, each offering another way of thinking about this place and our relationship to it.”

Another highlight will be the world premiere of Camille Henrot’s first theatrical performance, which Lees describes as bringing an entirely new dimension to her practice while reflecting AIR’s commitment to supporting artists as they venture into new territory. Debuting at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen before heading to New York for Performa in September, Henrot’s commedia dell’arte reimagines and restages the traditional characters and comic devices of the Italian Renaissance theatrical tradition within a modern-day New York City apartment building.

“One of the great pleasures of AIR is seeing audiences make connections between those different experiences over the course of the week,” Lees continued. “I’m looking forward to watching those conversations unfold again this summer.”

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