AIR RETREAT 2026

Monday, July 27
9:30am–3:30pm
Toklat at Aspen Center for Environmental Studies
By Invitation

The 2026 AIR Retreat brought together a group of artists and thinkers to share food and conversation ahead of the festival’s public program, expanding on the themes of Figures in a Landscape through a series of moderated discussions led by AIR Retreat Working Group members Aria Dean and Evan Calder Williams.

Nestled within the high mountain setting at Toklat, a center operated by the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), the retreat built on conversations begun at the inaugural AIR Retreat in 2025 to think through the contradictions and potentials embedded in the idea of landscape itself—and what often remains just out of its frame. In the wake of recent decades marked by dramatic shifts in technologies of imaging, navigation, surveillance, and circulation, the session reconsidered the longer histories that crystallized around conventional distinctions between figure and landscape, subject and background, and asked how artists, filmmakers, writers, and performers seek to develop new ways of seeing.

About AIR Retreat:

The AIR Retreat is an annual gathering of artists and interdisciplinary thinkers that serves as a catalyst for the festival and as an ongoing space for reflection by and for artists. Rather than approaching artistic leadership as the work of individuals alone, each retreat foregrounds the ways in which cultural institutions can create the conditions for new forms of creative practice and sustain the role of art in cultural and civic life. Against a moment of profound change for the arts and society, AIR’s ten-year initiative asks what gathering and collective conversation can offer artists and thinkers as they imagine new ways of working.

The 2026 AIR Retreat was curated by Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, Vic Brooks, AIR Senior Curatorial Advisor, Stella Bottai, Senior Curator, and Anisa Jackson, Curator at Large, with Aria Dean and Evan Calder Williams. Retreat participants include Andrea Lissoni, Charles Aubin, Denis Pernet, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Irena Haiduk, Jenny Jaskey, Jordan Carter, Jynne Dilling, Kali Malone, Linda Goode Bryant, Nuar Alsadir, Okwui Okpokwasili, Patrick House, Peter Born, Simone Browne, Stefanie Hessler, Stephen O’Malley, and Zachary Kaplan.

Aria Dean

Artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work investigates structures of race, power, and representational systems.

Evan Calder Williams

Author, associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and contributing editor of e-flux Journal.

Nuar Alsadir

Poet, nonfiction writer, psychoanalyst and professor whose work explores selfhood, embodied knowledge, unconscious communication, and what it takes to feel alive.

Charles Aubin

Curator working across visual art and performance.

Peter Born

Director, composer, and designer of performances, often in collaboration with artists David Thompson and Okwui Okpokwasili.

Simone Browne

Author and Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jordan Carter

Curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York.

Jynne Dilling

Poet, and Vice President and Deputy Publisher at Riverhead Books.

Linda Goode Bryant

Linda Goode Bryant is an artist, educator, gallerist, social activist, filmmaker and farmer.

Irena Haiduk

Directs Yugoexport—a blind and non-aligned oral corporation powering production of books, apparel, orations, and films.

Stefanie Hessler

Curator, writer, editor, and director of Swiss Institute.

Patrick House

Neuroscientist and writer fascinated by the mysteries of the mind, consciousness, and the strange ways brains can be manipulated.

Jenny Jaskey

Director of American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.

Zachary Kaplan

Leads public programming for the Getty’s region-wide, thematically driven art event and philanthropic initiative, PST Art.

Andrea Lissoni

Andrea Lissoni, PhD, is Artistic Director of Haus der Kunst, München.

Kali Malone

Composer and musician working with pipe organ, chamber ensembles, and electroacoustic formats to create durational compositions that draw from polyphonic traditions.

Okwui Okpokwasili

Artist, performer, choreographer, and writer known for multidisciplinary performances merging dance, theatre, and installation.

Stephen O’Malley

Guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist whose work has defined drone and experimental music through groups such as Sunn O))).

Denis Pernet

Curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary.

Images: Left to right: Aria Dean, Zoë Hitzig, Lily Hu, Sara Imari Walker, Clemens Apprich, Tung-Hui Hu, Peter N. Miller, photo: Benjamin Rasmussen; Aria Dean, photo: Molly Matalon; Evan Calder Williams, photo: Tim Geany; Andrea Lissoni, photo: Andrea Rossetti; Simone Browne; Charles Aubin, photo: Hollis Johnson; Denis Pernet; Hans Ulrich Obrist, photo: Lukas Wassmann; Irena Haiduk, photo: David Born; Jordan Carter, photo: Gabriela Herman; Jynne Dilling, photo: Jane Bruce; Kali Malone, photo: Devon Corman; Linda Goode Bryant © Ari Marcopolous; Nuar Alsadir, photo: Senta Simond; Okwui Okpokwasili © Michael Avedon; Patrick House, photo: Albert Law; Peter Born; Zachary Kaplan; Stefanie Hessler, photo: Lila Barth; Stephen O’Malley, photo: David & Douglas.