ASPEN —I wondered who would be the first to bring up the elephant in the room. Or more specifically, the elephant “product.”
There were balls of it holding up the paintings and one or two incorporated into the work itself. Most of them had words written on them in brightly colored glitter paint.
About three paintings into Gallery 2 of the , my 11-year-old finally asked, “Is that — poop?”
“Yes, the artist has incorporated elephant dung into his work,” I replied.
“So he put poop in his painting on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
And I didn’t. Even after reading the analysis of Chris Ofili’s “Night and Day,” I didn’t know what he was trying to get across on the floor-to-ceiling canvases, but I was starting to get my own ideas.
Not having the answers, or there not strictly being answers, is what makes art so awesome.
As Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
And if ever there was a museum that sought to be an ideal home for mysterious creations, it’s on the corner of East Hyman Avenue and South Spring Street in Aspen.
Opened in August 2014, the Aspen Art Museum doesn’t have a permanent collection of its own but rather hosts emerging contemporary artists who pioneer art’s new horizons.
Nearly a decade before opening, the Museum set up three criteria for exhibitions to be displayed inside the $45 million building. Shows must be “first-time U.S. solo museum exhibitions by significant emerging contemporary artists; solo exhibitions by important or established contemporary artists that focus on new, unrecognized or underappreciated aspects of their artistic output or group exhibitions curated to address topical, cultural, social or political matter.”
So, in a word, it has to be new.
The building itself, the first permanent U.S. museum by star architect Shigeru Ban, certainly fits the criteria.
The woven basket-like exterior of wooden strips is actually wood veneer covering a mixture of paper and resin. The interior is sleek glass, steel and concrete.
Ban designed “breathing room” around the museum to make it less intimidating to visitors. Curving, undulating benches and an outside exhibit create a place for people to gather, whether they are going in the museum or not.
The building is easy to enter. For one thing there is no entrance fee, since the museum is completely funded by private donations.
The Grand Stair on the east side of the building is divided into inside and outside space by a glass wall. Even when the building is closed, visitors can take the exterior side of the stairs to the public rooftop and its expansive view of the mountains.
If your legs are tired from time on those mountains, there is a glass elevator with all its workings exposed for intrigued visitors to watch when traveling among the museum’s four levels.
The museum is home to 17,500 square feet of exhibition space, including a roof deck sculpture garden, the Grand Stair, the Commons and six galleries.
We entered Gallery 1 through the type of ordinary metal, push-bar door that you would find in any stairwell. It was painted white and said simply “Night.”
Upon entering we were instantly enveloped by a darkness, only sparingly lit by the illumination on the paintings themselves. As our eyes adjusted a series of dark, lush, Matisse-like paintings emerged from the indigo-painted walls.
A museum guide explained how the walls were painted a particular shade to draw out colors in the painting.
Downstairs in Gallery 5 the cement walls and floor where covered with gray carpet and the lights were even lower to cajole figures out of the blue and silver paintings in Ofili’s series “The Blue Rider.” The museum’s display spaces are changed to provide the best possible backdrop for the art.
The museum volunteer in the room explained to me that these works were produced shortly after Ofili moved to Trinidad and became fascinated with the play of light and landscape as day transitions into night.
Cool.
Chryss Cada is a freelance writer and adjunct professor of journalism at Colorado State University. Visit her at chryss.com.
