Keith Mayerson:
My American Dream
(Rocky Mountain High)

Hippies, rock bands, mountain warfare military units, and beloved comic strip characters converge in Keith Mayerson’s My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High). For over two decades, Denver-raised Mayerson (b. 1966, Cincinnati, OH) has turned his focus to the cultural heritage and folklore of the United States, scrutinizing the visual symbolism of Americana. The artist’s paintings immerse viewers in the media culture, political history, and pop icons that characterize his perception of the world. His decade-spanning project, titled My American Dream, is equal parts pop and personal, juxtaposing paintings of family photographs with those of both little-known histories and mainstream visual culture. 

Aspen Art Museum presents the latest chapter of My American Dream, composed of all new paintings, focused on Aspen and its idiosyncratic identity and underground, avant garde pasts. Mayerson’s Rocky Mountain High pays tribute to his childhood in 1970s suburban Denver and his impressions of Aspen and the mountain towns he visited as a teenager. The Aspen Idea, a concept formed by Aspen’s founders in the postwar era to unite mind, body, and spirit for individual and collective betterment, looms large within the exhibition. 

Community and family are central to the Aspen Idea, and many works explore the utopian idealism that colored Mayerson’s upbringing, apparent in a painting of long-haired youths in front of Aspen’s famed Jerome Hotel, modeled after a 1971 photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Elsewhere in the exhibition, country folk singer John Denver serenades the Muppets at the base of Aspen’s iconic Maroon Bells, the Grateful Dead play their inaugural show at Red Rocks, and the 10th Mountain Division assemble by a scenic slope. On another canvas, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang ice skate under a galactic canopy. 

Mayerson’s images narrate a celebratory, wistful time capsule of this pocket of the world. The artist appropriates the aesthetic of a famed Aspen ski map poster from 1980, presenting this familiar panorama anew. Throughout the exhibition, he lingers on landscape as subject more broadly, transitioning out from these depictions of Aspen’s ski mountains in varied ways. Many works are painted from his own photographs shot last year from the tops of Aspen’s ski mountains. Across these majestic vistas, the sublime unfolds. 

The accretion of Mayerson’s memories, both legible and unfamiliar, forms an antidote to a world inundated with images. These analog moments, long ago erased, still allude to a present rendered by Mayerson’s vivid, polychromatic brushstrokes. Each character fits into their own imaginary, forming an autobiographical yet spectral vision of Colorado’s My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High).