The Aspen Art Museum was founded in the summer of 1979 as the Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, housed in a disused hydroelectric power plant. According to its curator, Courtenay Finn, the institution functioned more “as an artist’s run space for artists to show their work and also to bring works by other artists they respected or interested,” and most exhibitions were of local artists. In 2005, the current director and chief curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, arrived in Aspen with huge ambitions: “We could be the best midsized museum in the country, which is so not sexy,” she told the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear. “Or we could be the best non-collecting museum in the world. Our donors could give their collections to other institutions and give us funding.” The museum’s identity started to change with more showing of contemporary artists from not only the East and West Coast, but also other countries. Rather than starting a collection, the leadership really wanted a bigger building and more exhibition space to show art in different ranges of media. Thus, its trendy, award-winning new building at downtown opened in 2014, and the design of Shigeru Ban attracted national attention and successfully raised endowment pledges of nearly $75 million. By bringing a 400 percent increase in visitorship, it puts Aspen on the map as a cultural destination.…show more content… The museum has become a space where people could gather around, and the very notion of “art center,” which “not only exhibits, but also channels the issues that arise in contemporary social debate,” is carried on through
