For two decades, the ArtCrush auction and gala has served as the largest annual fundraiser for Aspen Art Museum. This year’s auction raised over $4M, which supports the Museum’s innovative exhibitions and dynamic educational programs presented to the public free of charge. In celebration of Aspen Art Museum’s artist-led founding, donating artists retain a percentage of their work’s value.
The gala honored artist Adrián Villar Rojas, recipient of the 2026 Lewis Family Art Award at the Aspen Art Museum. Villar Rojas’ multi-floor exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals is currently on view at the Museum through April 11, 2027. The artist’s practice can be understood as a system of world building: long term, collaborative projects that unfold as site specific experiences, at once imposing and fragile. Through use of sculpture, drawing, video, writing, architecture, scientific research, computational world building, parametric design, live digital simulations and performative traces, he builds complex environments in which objects, bodies, climates and fictions operate as part of the same evolving system. The exhibition explores the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, tracing the multispecies boundaries of a post-Anthropocene time in which past, present and future collapse into one another.
For the third consecutive year, the Museum’s auction partner, Christie’s, conducted the live auction during the 21st annual ArtCrush gala. Sara Friedlander, Christie’s Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, served as the auctioneer.
This year’s ArtCrush featured artworks donated by leading international artists, including work by Kelly Akashi, Xinyi Cheng, George Condo, Sayre Gomez, Camille Henrot, Keith Mayerson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ding Shilun, and Adrián Villar Rojas, among others, all of which were on view in an exhibition at the Museum ahead of the event. An online auction included a focus on works on paper and a design section organized in collaboration with Aspen-based architect and Museum board member Sarah Broughton of Rowland+Broughton celebrated the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities.
