After two consecutive museum-wide exhibitions, the Aspen Art Museum is presenting several different solo and group exhibitions this winter.
After two consecutive museum-wide exhibitions, the Aspen Art Museum is presenting several different solo and group exhibitions this winter. From sculpture to painting to film, the exhibitions currently on view are Jeffrey Gibson’s The Spirits Are Laughing, Hervé Télémaque’s A Hopscotch of the Mind, Mungo Thomson’s Sculptures, and Sanya Kantarovsky’s A Solid House. Multiple artists’ creations are found in another piece, Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper. “We are interested in the stories and the questions that each of these artists is putting forth today and want to amplify these artists voices,” said Amy Roldan, the museum’s marketing/communications manager. “We strive to share varied, intimate, and meaningful experiences of art with our visitors, with a variety of themes and mediums to explore on every floor of the museum.” Two exhibits stand out for their exploration of culture, identity, and race.
Artist Jeffrey Gibson. Brian Barlow / Photo Credit.
From Colorado Springs-born artist Jeffrey Gibson, on the rooftop of the museum, visitors will find The Spirits are Laughing, a new site-specific sculpture represented by an assemblage of three anthropomorphized heads that incorporate stones, fossils, and other natural materials, grouped with his signature brightly-colored flags, each with a different pattern and text.
Jeffrey Gibson, The Spirits Are Laughing, 2022. (Photos courtesy Jeffrey Gibson, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.)
The MacArthur award-winning artist, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, mixes indigenous aesthetic histories with the visual language of modernism to explore culture, history, and identity, basing this work around Indigenous kinship philosophy — “the idea of seeing the land as an extension of one’s own family or oneself.” In the galleries, an accompanying video filmed in Aspen features 15 queer-identified Native and non-Native color guard performers spinning flags, singing, and speaking to the land throughout multiple sites in the Roaring Fork Valley.
From left to right: Leo Balcer, Megan Templeton, Anna Daugherty, Ryan Vela, and Mazhone Morgan. Jeffrey Gibson, The Spirits Are Laughing, 2022. Images courtesy Jeffrey Gibson, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Brett Novak/Photo Credit
Alongside the Gibson and Télémaque exhibits, Thomson’s Sculptures and Sanya Kantarovsky’s A Solid House, as well as Shadow Tracer: Works on Paper, provide explorations into illusion, experimentation, and passage of time via drawing, sculpture, and film.
