Figures
in a
landscape

Camille Henrot

Ivan Cheng

Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks

Lyle Ashton Harris with Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto

Los Thuthanaka

Matthew Barney

AIR 2026:
Figures in a Landscape

The second edition of the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival, Figures in a Landscape, took place July 27–31, 2026, at various venues across the Roaring Fork Valley.

Figures in a Landscape was inspired by a title that recurs across literature, cinema, music, and painting, reflecting the interdisciplinary spirit of the program while naming an unstable relationship between subject and setting. The program of commissions, performances, talks, and readings drew upon Aspen’s landscape, a tapestry of raw wilderness and mediated environments, to question how acts of staging and human intervention shape understandings of place and power.

The festival took its cues from two distinct but related ways that space is culturally determined. On one hand is the category of landscape: not as a neutral or merely spectacular backdrop, but historically charged by inherited imaginaries and ways of seeing. On the other is the set: designed to be explicitly oriented towards an audience and codified by longstanding theatrical and exhibitionary traditions for the construction of meaning and the interpretation of art, histories, and ideas. If the cultural mediation of landscape shapes how we see, a set is also designed to shape how we act.

Commissions & Performances

Set in motion by Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals at Aspen Art Museum, AIR 2026 extended from museum to mountaintop, chapel to ranch, and theater to meadow. Camille Henrot presented the world premiere of Commedia dell’arte, a slapstick satire that staged a New York City apartment building within the Wheeler Opera House. Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar rose on a monumental vertical screen superimposing one glacial landscape atop another, accompanied by an ensemble led by Deantoni Parks. Ivan Cheng introduced a new “live situation for camera.” Lyle Ashton Harris brought an encyclopedic montage of oral histories and artistic influences to the museum’s rooftop. Two early morning concerts conjured immaterial sonic landscapes: performing on the Aspen Chapel’s newly restored organ, Kali Malone wove intricate and evolving harmonic cycles, and Los Thuthanaka’s expansive, genre-melding compositions reverberated from the peak of Aspen Mountain. Carrying forward the festival’s iterative trajectory, with each edition evolving from the last, Matthew Barney unveiled ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, a new sculpture developed from his AIR 2025 performance.

Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes

The year’s Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes brought together three artists whose work has profoundly reshaped the contemporary cultural landscape across film, literature, performance, and the visual arts. Writer, filmmaker, and artist Miranda July took the stage following the publication of her bestselling novel All Fours, and the wide-ranging conversations it has sparked around aging, desire, and reinvention. Following her participation in the landmark exhibition Monuments (MOCA and The Brick, Los Angeles), filmmaker Julie Dash’s keynote marked thirty-five years since her feature Daughters of the Dust, whose singular cinematic language continues to influence generations of artists. Returning to Aspen after the premiere of TACTICAL parallax at AIR 2025, Matthew Barney reflected on three decades of artworks that construct symbolic worlds where ritual, history, spectacle, and violence converge, alongside the unveiling of ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, an outdoor sculpture that extends the narrative and spatial logic of last year’s performance.

Talks & Readings

Shifting registers between the incantatory, the meditative, and the epochal, AIR 2026 commissioned artists, writers, and thinkers to awaken consciousness through poetry, talks and collective exchange. Morgan Bassichis positioned performance as a means of resurrection, tracing the recurrence of ghosts within cultural memory and their desire to inhabit these spectres. Nuar Alsadir and Patrick House staged a shape-shifting encounter that unsettles the contours of laughter, consciousness, and selfhood in real time. In the early morning stillness of Aspen Chapel, poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis orbited the “vertigo of the infinite,” a generative dizziness that arises when the mind brushes up against the boundlessness of the cosmos and the limits of perception.

AIR 2026 was presented with support from

LEAD BANKING PARTNER
Bank of America

LEAD INSTITUTIONAL PARTNER
LYRA Art Foundation

Special Thanks to Prada

PROGRAM PARTNERS
Anderson Ranch Art Center, Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), Aspen Film, Aspen Chapel; Aspen Music Festival and School, Performa, Wheeler Opera House

Team & Collaborators

AIR is founded and directed by Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Artistic Director and CEO.

Figures in a Landscape was curated by Nicola Lees; Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator; Vic Brooks, Senior Curatorial Advisor; Stella Bottai, Senior Curator at Large; Claude Adjil, Eliza Ryan, and Anisa Jackson, Curators at Large, with Mariana Fernández, AIR Editor and Project Curator, and in consultation with Jynne Dilling, AIR Literary Advisor.

The AIR 2026 Retreat was moderated by Aria Dean and Evan Calder Williams.

AIR’s Operations and Production were led by Christine Egaña Navin, Deputy Directer of Operations and AIR Executive Producer; Jaclyn Carr, Deputy Director of Advancement; Tommy Ralph Pace, Director of External Affairs; Alicia Russo, AIR Festival Producer; Ryan Jenkins, AIR Technical Director; Renata Bustamante, Event Manager; Alex Fonseca, Operations and Hospitality Manager; Alix Dana, Dana Mannix; and Raul Altamura-Zbengheci, AIR Creative Producer; Nora Chellew, AIR Producer; and Dria Brown, Associate Producer. Graphic design by Anne Stock.

With special thanks to Michael Baca, Lillian Bell, Kitty Boone, Peggy Burke, Patrick Chamberlain, Paul Chan, Meredith Darrow, Dan Dufford, Alan Fletcher, Lindsy Fortier, Bob Gersh, Mike Harrington, Zoë Hitzig, Andrea Jenkins Wallace, Jordan Kantor, Jim Kravits, Molly O’Leary, Joel Lubin, Peter N. Miller and Ilaria Puri Purini, Alexandra Munroe, Gael Neeson, Kate Northfield Lanich, Allison and Dan Rose, Robert Rosenkranz, Sarah Roy.