AIR 2025

Matthew Barney, Redoubt, 2018. Production still. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

A week of radical imagination, art, and exchange in Aspen.

AIR brings together artists, scientists, technologists, cultural leaders, and audiences to gather in Aspen’s alpine landscape. The program begins with a closed-door retreat and culminates in a free public festival featuring performances, newly commissioned artworks, and interdisciplinary dialogues.

AIR FESTIVAL: JULY 29–31, 2025
What does it mean to be human at a time when life itself must be redefined? AIR 2025 creates the conditions for a different kind of attention—one that allows the subconscious to surface, and for meaning to be felt before it is named. The gathering takes inspiration from Paul Chan’s multi-year odyssey in programming a synthetic self-portrait through artificial intelligence and Sara Imari Walker’s challenge to conventional definitions of life in her book Life As No One Knows It, from which AIR 2025 takes its name. The renowned artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney will headline the future-facing program, which draws inspiration from the historic Aspen International Design Conference, where pioneering figures such as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Sontag, and Steve Jobs convened between 1949 and 2006.

AIR RETREAT: July 26–28, 2025
The AIR 2025 festival program will be preceded by the AIR Retreat, an artist-led gathering of thirty leading experts from the arts, humanities, sciences, industry, and policy. The retreat will focus on developing frameworks for artists and thinkers to inform the design of new technological tools. The first edition, held from July 26 to 28, 2025, is conceived by the AIR curatorial team in collaboration with artists Paul Chan and Aria Dean, poet and technology researcher Zoë Hitzig, and writer Evan Calder Williams. AIR Retreat 2025 is convened in partnership with Aspen Institute’s Arts Program, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Creative Labor, Creative Conditions initiative, and e-flux Journal, in which writings that emerge from the conversations will appear.

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INTRODUCING AIR
AIR, Aspen Art Museum’s new flagship initiative, is designed to explore the role of art in addressing the questions and complexities of our time through interdisciplinary collaborations, conversations, and site-specific artworks and performances. Established as a year-round program dedicated to commissioning and artistic research, AIR culminates each summer with dedicated programming. These gatherings celebrate the ways in which artists redefine leadership and expand our consciousness.

INVESTING IN ARTISTS AS LEADERS
The Aspen Art Museum is committed to supporting artists across generations as they shape the future. We believe artists are—and have always been—visionaries and leaders. This new program is designed to empower those who want to connect, innovate, and lead by providing them with the necessary skills, tools, and resources, as well as a cohort to lean on.