On a late July afternoon in Aspen, I stood in the living room of a private home with mountain views streaming through a trio of nearly floor to ceiling windows on one side and, on the other, a major painting by Julie Mehretu looming over the stone fireplace. Down the hall hung a stunning Grace Hartigan, all chunky blocks of green and burnt sienna with muscular swoops of gray. This wasn’t part of the Aspen Art Museum’s official Art Week circuit of collector visits; it was a private visit to the home of a gracious host with a fondness for rowdy dogs, popcorn, and world-class paintings. In fact, there were no collector home visits on the museum’s itinerary this year. Last year there were three, and collector tours were a regular feature in previous years.
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In a town where, since the pandemic, home values have soared—last year, casino magnate Steve Wynn and discount stock mogul Thomas Peterffy co-purchased a $108 million home there—the Aspen Art Museum’s annual fundraiser week used to radiate wealth, culminating in a glitzy wine-tasting party at a collector’s home and, the following night, the museum’s equally glitzy gala.
But since Nicola Lees took over as director, in 2020, the strategy has shifted to something more cerebral. A few miles away from the home I visited, the Aspen Art Museum was preparing a keynote presentation by German filmmaker Werner Herzog to be introduced by art world über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist under the banner of its inaugural AIR festival—a 10-year, $20 million, artist-led interdisciplinary program—and, if you listen to the new messaging, the future of the institution.
That contrast—the wealth on the walls and the ideas onstage—says a lot about where the museum finds itself in 2025. Twenty years after founding its gala, ArtCrush, in a town where an apartment can run north of $4 million, the museum is attempting a sharp shift toward being a global institution and away from its renown as a collector’s clubhouse.
The question is whether that’s even possible. Can Lees keep the money flowing to the museum while at the same time taking the emphasis off Aspen’s deep pockets? Can a Kunsthalle tucked away in a tony hamlet become a beacon of the international art scene even as the surrounding area grows increasingly expensive and is, to be kind, easy to get to only if you can afford it, and impossible to reach if you can’t? (For the sake of equity, the museum has been free since 2008, thanks to Amy Phelan and her husband, John, who, in March, became Secretary of the Navy under President Trump. But that hardly diminishes Aspen’s reputation for turbulence-racked flights or the four-hour drive from Denver.)
The Aspen Art Museum was never supposed to be quiet. When former director Heidi Zuckerman took over in 2005, she inherited a scrappy regional institution in a town better known for its après-ski than its programming. By 2014, she had rebranded it entirely—securing a $45 million Shigeru Ban–designed building in the center of town, backed by a formidable group of donors whose art collections doubled as investment portfolios.
“This museum, in this setting, with this architect would not have existed without Heidi’s vision, her tenacity and the group of supporters she had around her,” one source told me in the 50 minutes bookended by a talk between artist Adrián Villar Rojas and novelist Álvaro Enrigue titled “Historical Fictions, Future Myths” and a keynote by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Francis Kéré. Larry and Susan Marx, John and Amy Phelan, Bob and Nancy Magoon, they built this place, she said.
Building the museum was no easy task. When Zuckerman started, she needed more than funding: She needed armor. “Heidi had the thickest skin of anyone I’ve ever met,” Larry Marx told me. “Most people would’ve folded their tent and left town.”
At the time, the museum planned to build on city-owned land. But the site required a public referendum, and in a town that saw the museum as a playground for the wealthy, the optics proved toxic. “It was voted down two-to-one,” Marx recalled. “People said, ‘You’re just a bunch of elites.’” (Ultimately, the museum acquired a plot of privately owned land.)
The criticism turned personal, and some in the community attacked Zuckerman’s income. She earned around $850,000 in 2013, which was closer to her New York counterparts at MoMA and the Guggenheim than it was to similarly regional institutions like the MCA Denver and moCa Cleveland. “It was nasty,” he said. “Yes, her income was very high that year, but she saved us a fortune. She raised $70 million. What she made was a lot cheaper than if we had hired consultants to go out and raise the money.”
By that time, ArtCrush, the annual summer fundraising gala, had become the marquee event, earning the museum millions. The Phelans hosted its more private counterpart, WineCrush, at their home (people still gab about the Walead Beshty cracked mirror floor in their living room); Sotheby’s and J.P. Morgan sponsored the affair. The ticketed event became a legendary spectacle of big bottles and bigger egos. Museum directors mingled with Kardashians. There was fine dining, sommelier pairings of vintage wine, and an afterparty during which, I’m told, guests wound up in the pool, with or without clothes. The last WineCrush was in 2019, one year before the museum’s current director, Nicola Lees, took the captain’s chair.
But for all the absurdity, the institution was undeniably successful. The museum raised money, drew big names, and planted its flag in a resort town where visibility mattered as much as credibility.
If Heidi Zuckerman built the museum, Nicola Lees has tried to redefine it. When she took the helm in 2020, Lees inherited not just a building, but an identity—one forged in the gala era, driven by collectors, and occasionally haunted by the very visibility it craved. Her challenge was not to raise $70 million or survive a referendum, but to remake the museum’s image.
The AIR program is the clearest articulation of that mission. Structured like an Aspen Ideas Festival for the art world, it offers talks, workshops, and collaborations aimed at reframing the museum as a center for thought leadership rather than a staging ground for social capital.
“It’s more intellectual,” said one longtime patron. “They’re trying to move away from the party.”
The shift goes beyond programming. Zuckerman curated splashy solo shows; Lees delegates—to guest curators, artists, and rising stars like Daniel Merritt, now chief curator.
As one collector put it: “I don’t know what she likes. I couldn’t tell you what her taste is. But I can tell you she’s extremely intelligent—and good at mending fences.”
That diplomacy matters. After years of scorched bridges—Zuckerman had sharp teeth, one museum benefactor told me—Lees has restored calm, even while experimenting with new PR, a quieter gala, and more thoughtful messaging. “What’s so fascinating to me is that Heidi did exactly what she needed to do to build the museum, and Nicola is doing exactly what she needs to do,” a director at a powerful global gallery told me. “It’s a totally different vision, wildly different in style.” And it’s working. At a post-AIR dinner, I overheard one of the guest artists saying that Lees was building “one
of the most culturally important destinations in the United States.”
The irony, of course, is that the effort to downplay exclusivity requires extraordinary control—of message, of optics, of who gets in the room. Unlike previous years, press were not invited to the ArtCrush gala, which a museum representative said brought in $4 million, right in line with what it’s raised since 2021. (Between 2015 and 2019 the fundraiser brought in an average of about $2.5 million a year.)
When asked about the exclusion of press, Lees told me that, yes, it was intentional. Given the length and intensity of the programming during Art Week, she thought it was more exciting for members of the press to focus instead on the AIR bill of fare—including Matthew Barney’s TACTICAL parallax, an odyssey that involved fighting rush-hour traffic to get to an offsite location for a performance that included horses, a sled dog team, and, per a pamphlet given to attendees, the “use of a firearm that discharges blank rounds.”
Still, sources say the museum was fuming after last year’s coverage, largely positive, framed the event as a lavish summer camp. In these pages, I described it as a place where “everyone is invited to everything, with the caveat that you have to make it there first.” If the goal is to change the narrative, pulling the press from the gala was a bold first step.
Lees doesn’t exactly reject the premise of trying to change the museum’s reputation as collector-built, but she doesn’t engage with it much either. “I don’t know if I’ve tried to change it … they hired me knowing who I was,” she told me over a Zoom call joined by Merritt. Before Aspen, she held roles at the Serpentine Galleries in London and NYU’s 80WSE Gallery.
The Aspen Art Museum, Merritt pointed out, was founded by artists in the 1970s, “hippies and radicals” who came to Aspen in search of space and freedom. Lees agreed, saying the town itself was “founded by thinkers,” and that the museum’s role today is to keep that intellectual legacy alive, despite the shift in economic realities.
If the museum’s identity has shifted under Lees, its support base has started to shift with it. Some longtime donors and board members have taken a step back. “You have to let the museum evolve,” said Larry Marx. “That’s part of why I was happy to get off the board.”
In their place, a quieter, younger generation has taken up the reins. Amnon Rodan, of the Rodan + Fields fortune, is now board president. He and his wife, Katie, are part of a group that includes Melony and Adam Lewis, and Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul—collectors with deep philanthropic experience and little interest in spectacle.
In the crowded café adjacent to the Hotel Jerome, collector Holly Baril said the new guard in Aspen “doesn’t want to be front and center.” Baril and her husband, Albert, helped found the Emerging Art Fund at MOCA Los Angeles; they weren’t very involved until Lees arrived, but love the path Lees is taking. “Nicola’s created something people want to be part of. A strong community that doesn’t feel performative,” she said.
This year’s ArtCrush cochairs embody that shift: Sarah Arison, MoMA board president; Jen Rubio, cofounder of Away luggage and Whitney Museum trustee; and Charlie Pohlad, of the Minneapolis-based Pohlad family, reflect a network of emerging collectors more aligned with Lees’s mission.
Part of that mission is rooted in the museum’s structure: It has no permanent collection. For Albert Baril, that’s the key. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “It’s a platform for discovery. They’re not hitting us up to raise another hundred grand to buy this or that.”
Aspen is a place defined by scarcity—of land, housing, access. “Aspen has always been expensive,” said realtor Riley Warwick. “But now it’s almost embarrassingly expensive.” Pre-pandemic, it was $1 million per bedroom. Now? “Closer to $2 million.”
Still, Lees and her team have found ways to root the museum in the local community. “We work with every single school in the valley,” she said. “We see 3,000 children come through our doors in the spring for the Youth Art Expo.” That kind of outreach may not dominate headlines like ArtCrush, but it reflects a deep investment in Aspen’s intellectual and creative future—regardless of the housing market.
What kind of museum it becomes may depend less on its intentions than on its surroundings. Aspen is not a blank slate; it’s a wealthy enclave with a magnetic pull and a hefty price tag. Even the most daring programming must contend with the place’s reality: who can live there, who can stay long enough to care, and what kind of culture flourishes in the rare air between exclusivity and access.
A version of this article appears in the 2025 edition of the annual Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “A Little Place Called Aspen.”