Amid Aspen Fairs, Collectors Peruse Big-Ticket Art, Private Jets, $62.5M House

Long before Aspen belonged to billionaires, it belonged to one millionaire’s imagination.

Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke arrived in Aspen after the end of World War II with an audacious vision: to remake the fading mining and ranching community into a cultural capital. He snapped up properties across town, launched cultural events, and in perhaps his most inspired move, hired an artist. Over the next few years, the Bauhaus polymath Herbert Bayer would leave his fingerprints all over Aspen, designing a modernist sundeck for one of its mountaintops and restoring its historic buildings.

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One of them, Hotel Jerome, just played host to the third edition of the Aspen Art Fair, which closed on Saturday. Thirty-eight exhibitors, from New York stalwarts like Albertz Benda and Marianne Boesky Gallery (which has had a branch in town since 2017) to international heavyweights like Perrotin and Southern Guild, filled its ballroom and converted its guest rooms, doing brisk business along the way.

Bob Chase at the 2026 Aspen Art Fair opening preview. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

Paepcke’s grand experiment in cultural patronage still inspires. “The spirit of building upon that cultural legacy that exists is something we all should be trying to contribute to,” Bob Chase, the fair’s co-founder, told me, after delivering a talk at the fair about Aspen’s cultural history.

The pace at the fair was decidedly Aspen. Dealers described an intimate, almost languid, atmosphere, where buyers lingered over works and conversations were had at length. Collectors including Barbara and Bruce Berger and Sharon and John Hoffman were in attendance, as well as artists Hank Willis Thomas, Cheryl Pope, Dustin Yellin, and Jewel.

Hank Willis Thomas at the 2026 Aspen Art Fair opening preview. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

At the fair’s VIP opening on Wednesday, Thomas Kelly, of Sean Kelly Gallery, said that he had been able to chat in his booth with collector Jorge Pérez for a good 20 minutes without “being pulled in 10 different directions.” The gallery said it placed works by Andy Gonzalez, Magdiel García Almanza, and José Dávila.

“The amount of people here who truly want to spend time learning, being educated, and caring about what they own is off the charts,” R & Company’s Zesty Meyers told me after selling a Roberto Lugo ceramic vase for $55,000.

Nikolai Haas and Zesty Meyers at R & Company’s booth at the 2026 Aspen Art Fair opening preview. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

Ryan Lee‘s presentation leaned “happy and fun,” Daisy Fornengo, an assistant director at the New York gallery, told me. Works by Masako Miki and Tim Braden quickly found buyers. Boesky totaled over $350,000 in sales, moving four works by the Haas Brothers and a mixed-media piece by Sanford Biggers, which went for $135,000. The fair “offers a collaborative spirit of engagement with this community and their deep love of collecting art,” the dealer said in an email.

Southern Guild, which has participated in the fair from the start, anchored its booth with works by Tschabalala Self, her first appearance with the Cape Town and New York outfit. It sold four Zanele Muholi photos for between $25,000 and $28,000 each, alongside two Usha Seejarim sculptures at $18,000 each and six works by Lebohang Kganye for $8,500 each.

Trevyn McGowan at the Southern Guild booth at the 2026 Aspen Art Fair opening preview. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

“You’re connecting in a different way than you would at a normal art fair, where things are quick and transactional,” the gallery’s founder, Trevyn McGowan, told me in an email at the end of Wednesday. “There’s less need to buy things immediately here.”

Additional pleasures awaited in the fair’s guest rooms, which were reimagined as miniature galleries. “From covering the bathtubs with boards to tarping the furniture to create a more uniform look,” Kelly Cornell, the fair’s director, said, “there’s just really brilliant ways of creating a mark and an environment for a memorable experience for the collector.” (Cornell also leads the Dallas Art Fair, but the two events are separate businesses.)

The Anat Ebgi Gallery x Balmain suite at Aspen Art Fair 2026 at Hotel Jerome. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

Spaceless Gallery installed freestanding wooden boards, since exhibitors were not allowed to drive nails into the room’s walls. Anat Ebgi teamed up with Balmain to present a salon-style shopping experience in one suite. Library Street Collective adorned its space with Jake Clark’s poppy ceramics, two of which sold. “It gives people a sense of what the pieces are going to be like at home,” the Detroit gallery’s Lorena Cruz Santiago told me.

One of the fair’s buzzier rooms held Toronto gallery Patel Brown’s presentation of offbeat paintings and sculptures by artist duo Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. One collector spent several minutes rearranging a group of canvases across the bed, as though envisioning how they might hang at home. Prices ranged from three to five figures, and one large landscape sold for $23,000.

The Patel Brown room at Aspen Art Fair 2026 at Hotel Jerome. Photo: Zach Hilty / BFA.com.

The big week for the collector crowd in Aspen also included the Intersect Aspen fair, bringing about 40 exhibitors to the Aspen Ice Garden, and the annual ArtCrush auction, which raised more than $4 million for the Aspen Art Museum.

Aspen Art Fair attendees could also partake of artist talks, cold plunges at places the Devil’s Punchbowl, and a truly surreal soirée at Redstone Ranch that doubled as a sales pitch for private jets. (“It’s like shaking God’s hand” is a thing that was said of that approach to flying.) An after-party followed at a grand mansion, built on spec and listed for $62.5 million.

Fernando Botero, Woman on a Horse (2012) on view at Jorge Pérez’s sculpture park. Photo: Min Chen.

But the most jaw-droppingly spectacular stop wasn’t an auction or a party; it was Pérez’s 200-acre property on Snowmass Mountain. There, the Miami-based collector and philanthropist has created a sculpture park with a dramatic alpine backdrop that is littered with dozens of works by artists like Fernando Botero, Anthony Caro, Robert Indiana, and William Kentridge. It’s a majestic place, and open only by appointment.

When you enter, you can glimpse Paloma Varga Weisz‘s Foreign Body, Hot Dogs (2022), a 26-foot-tall woman pierced by a massive branch who is sitting atop a shipping container. She looks both startlingly out of place and entirely at home. Getting a work of that scale onto the side of a mountain involved serious engineering, a bit of hubris, and tremendous imagination—all hallmarks of this luxurious little town.