AIR 2026 opens today, bringing art, performance, and landscape into dialogue across Aspen

AIR 2026 opens today at the Aspen Art Museum, launching five days of newly commissioned artworks, performances, talks, and readings across Aspen, Colorado. Running from July 27th to 31st, 2026, this year’s edition, Figures in a Landscape, explores the shifting relationship between people, place, and performance, turning Aspen’s mountains, theaters, chapels, and public spaces into a dynamic cultural canvas.

Borrowing its title from a phrase that echoes through literature, cinema, music, and painting, the festival considers landscape as something shaped as much by stories, architecture, and human presence as by nature itself. Stretching far beyond the museum, the program invites audiences to encounter contemporary art against the dramatic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

Art commissions that highlight the importance of landscape through performance and installation

AIR 2026 grows out of Adrián Villar Rojas’s exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals, currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum. Building on that foundation, the festival premieres a series of newly commissioned works spanning visual art, performance, film, and site-responsive installation.

Among the highlights, Camille Henrot debuts Commedia dell’arte, a theatrical production that turns the Wheeler Opera House into a fictional New York apartment building, using humor and satire to examine the rituals of contemporary urban life.

Lucy Raven presents Murderers Bar, a monumental moving-image work projecting glacial landscapes onto a towering vertical screen, accompanied by a live score led by Deantoni Parks. The installation reflects on geological time, shifting terrain, and environmental memory.

Elsewhere, Ivan Cheng premieres a new “live situation for camera,” blurring the line between performance, filmmaking, and lived experience, while Matthew Barney unveils ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, a monumental outdoor sculpture that expands the narrative of his acclaimed AIR 2025 performance into Aspen’s alpine landscape.

Miranda July headlines a week of conversations across disciplines

Among the festival’s central events is a keynote by Miranda July, following the international success of her bestselling novel All Fours. The artist, filmmaker, and writer reflects on reinvention, desire, and contemporary identity in a conversation spanning literature, film, and visual art.

The Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes also feature filmmaker Julie Dash, marking 35 years since Daughters of the Dust, alongside Matthew Barney, who revisits three decades of work exploring mythology, ritual, spectacle, and violence.

The wider program includes poetry readings, artist talks, and experimental dialogues. Morgan Bassichis explores memory and cultural inheritance through performance, while Nuar Alsadir and Patrick House discuss laughter and consciousness. Poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis close the festival with an early morning reading at Aspen Chapel, where language and sound meet quiet reflection.

Founded by Aspen Art Museum Artistic Director Nicola Lees, AIR has become one of the leading interdisciplinary festivals dedicated to contemporary culture. This year’s Figures in a Landscape treats Aspen not as a picturesque backdrop but as an active collaborator, where wilderness, architecture, and artistic vision continually shape one another.