ArtCrush, the Aspen Art Museum annual summer gala, honors Adrián Villar Rojas, recipient of the 2026 Lewis Family Art Award, in conjunction with the artist’s major solo exhibition on view at the Museum. 

Through an intersectional use of sculpture, drawing, video, writing, architecture, scientific research, computational world building, parametric design, live digital simulations and performative traces, Villar Rojas builds complex environments in which objects, bodies, climates and fictions operate as part of the same evolving system, exploring the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, and tracing the multispecies boundaries of a post Anthropocene time in which past, present and future collapse into one another.

In tandem with this award, "Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals," a solo exhibition featuring works by the artist, is on view across two floors of the museum. Conceived around the cave as both geological structure and mythological device, the exhibition transforms the museum into a space of double accumulation: mineral formations produced across deep time and symbolic forms produced by human imagination.