Dear Artist,
…you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Lots of newness underway here!
A month in review: As a lovely perk of exhibiting my work in Aspen City Hall, I left for Aspen with some VIP passes for several big art fairs in Aspen Art Week right after I sent you your last letter around this time last month. I then spent not one but two weeks at Anderson Ranch. (I’ll share more on that next month!) If you want to catch up on previous months, check out the dear artist archive.
My Work in Aspen’s City Hall
This month I visited my artwork featured in Aspen’s City Hall Biennial!
Reception: Thursday, September 11th
The Art:
The Exhibition:
The Reception: Thursday, September 11th
Art, music and refreshments will fill the three floors of Aspen City Hall on Thursday, September 11th during a free community reception celebrating the 11 local and regional artists in the city hall biennial exhibition. It will be a progressive event where we flow from one floor to the next, with each level having different snacks and some quick words from each artist, plus live music in the atrium. Come!
VIP @ Aspen Artweek!
As a lovely perk of exhibiting my work in Aspen City Hall, I participated in several world-class art events in Aspen this month with VIP tickets!
Aspen Art week must be felt to be believed, and I struggle to convey its intensity. “By late July, Aspen’s Social calendar runs on high-altitude overdrive,” wrote Daniel Cassady for ARTnews in his article about Aspen Art Week, and I couldn’t agree more. I felt like every single waking hour I had five different things I wanted to be doing at the same time. And I often managed to get more than one of them in, and then I feverishly asked other people to share their experiences of the good things I missed (for example, I missed out on Matthew Barney‘s Tactical Parallax because I stayed after Werner Herzog’s talk to visit with him one-on-one). The abundances multiplied daily. I’m still reeling! And I’m just beginning to unpack it all.
This article from W magazine was published the day I arrived on the scene, and nicely summarizes many main events of my trip for me: The Aspen Art Fair, Intersect Aspen, and Aspen Art Museum‘s inaugural AIR summit, which was a major highlight, and one I hope to cover more next month.
The Aspen Art Fair is an intimate salon-style takeover of Hotel Jerome. It also features excursions throughout the area including visits to the homes of notable collectors. Here I am at one of them:
Here’s a blurb from an article on the Aspen Art Fair:
“The Hotel Jerome itself-awarded a Michelin Key and widely considered Aspen’s cultural living room-plays a central role in the fair’s identity. Nearly every available space on the ground floor is used for art, with in-room installations transforming guest suites into salon-style exhibitions. While there are traditional art fair booths, the setting feels less like a convention center and more like a private club, fostering a kind of accidental intimacy: collectors stumble into gallerists, artists trade hiking recommendations with advisors, and fairgoers drift between paintings and mini-bars. It’s this atmosphere-deliberately informal, defiantly un-boothlike-that cofounders Becca Hoffman and Bob Chase see as a core part of the fair’s success.”
Yes, that was my experienece. My highlights included the Fine Art Group‘s annual women’s walk and talk, where I met a potential future collaborator for a wearable collection I’m working on for next year, experiencing James Surls‘ prints at Skye Gallery, visiting with curators and gallerists in their booths, seeing Anne Von Freyberg‘s work in person (and really just seeing the entire K Contemporary setup–such considered curation and playful use of space–it was my favorite by far!), and even peeping into the Libertine Popup right outside the fair.
I also attended Intersect Aspen and particularly enjoyed the obsessively rendered paintings of lost luggage by Spanish artist Cristobal Toral, who views each piece of luggage as a capsule of the traveling human soul. (I also have a thing for luggage and I get it).
All the while I toted my own work around and got so many complements. People came from across the room, emphatic about my bag and asking me where I got it!
Two other works that also found their homes from my time in Aspen include The Lost Saint and For Mimi (both pictured below).
Description: The lost saint, with the golden stitched halo, seeks guidance with head turned upward toward stars. Surrounding the saint is a portal/doorway in yellow. A blue moon form in the center right holds forms of flora and human hands, and red spots in pigment stick and wool. Beneath the moon: a web of hands reaching. Hands on top of hands and hands within hands. Blue wool malbrigo yarn draws over high-chroma orange space at center right. A smaller being in the lower right center moves left. Above the figure and below the orange, the outline of a fetus. To the right of the figure and highlighted in pigment stick is the artist’s stitched signature and date of the artwork. Constellations of stars throughout. Upper left a bright orange home form. Lower left: webwork layers of dark space and hands and pieces of orange. At lower hem of linen substrate, scrawled in the artist’s hand, reads: THE LOST SAINT JENNIFERNWELDEN 2025
Detail shots:
Two Weeks at Anderson Ranch!
More on that in my next letter!
Thank you dear artist for reading this letter. Please write soon with your creative questions! Remember, your musings shape what I write!
Until then, please enjoy…
Things Momo (my 22-month-old son) says this month:
He is now calling my mom “Darling.” Or, rather, “DA-WING!!” as he runs after her, reaching zealously in her direction, totally lovestruck. If she steps out of the room for a moment while he is confined in his high chair, he calls for her incessantly until she returns.
He identifies articles of clothing like “Shoes-on-you” and “pants-on-you.”
He is really into the colors and will identify an unknown object of interest by its color; he’ll eye something, reach his hand out, and say, “green-blue, yellow.” Which works when he gets the color correct. Many things he calls blue, even when they are not blue. I like this. I also wonder about blue.
He says “HEAH-vee” not just when something weighs a lot, but when something feels beyond his capacity. My friend Anne says all children are poets. 🙂
With love, Your Artist