“Turbulence 2025” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Architect and artist Suchi Reddy’s sculptural and sonic installation “Turbulence 2025,” on view at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden now through the fall, interweaves landscape, sound, and movement to create an immersive reflection on “ecological stress,” both visible and invisible, amid the climate crisis. A site-specific work commissioned by the garden, the sculpture is composed of two mirrored planes, each eight feet tall and five feet wide, that offer visitors a distorted view of the world around them. An otherworldly soundscape, developed in collaboration with composer and sound designer Malloy James, echoes nature’s cries for help. “‘Turbulence 2025’ is a work about listening to our environments—deeply, emotionally, and biologically,” Reddy says. “It’s about attuning to the distress signals of a living world under strain. Plants communicate when they are stressed. They emit high-frequency clicks, beyond the range of human hearing, that other species may perceive. I wanted to take that invisible sound and give it form—both visually and sonically—so that we might begin to feel the urgency that surrounds us in ways we’ve never quite heard or seen.”

“Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time” at the Clark Art Institute
“You know, one shift I do is backwards and forwards. Sometimes I think I’m part of this world today. Sometimes I feel that maybe I belong in history or in prehistory, or that there’s no such thing as time,” the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi said in a 1972 interview taped in his Long Island City, New York, studio. “If you can escape from that time constraint, then the whole world becomes someplace where you belong.” The idea of moving between the past and present, or even existing outside of time altogether, flowed throughout Noguchi’s prolific six-decade career, during which he created sculptural works with a broad range of materials, designed furniture and lighting, created stage sets for the likes of Martha Graham, and even founded his own museum. Not one to take a linear approach to time, Noguchi frequently drew connections between disparate temporal points in striking, wholly original ways. On view from July 19 through Oct. 13 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, “Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time” presents a survey of Noguchi’s work across various media, tracing his interpretations of geological time, his explorations of memory, and his infatuations with the Stone and Space Ages. More than simply a showcase of his incredible range as an artist, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse into Noguchi’s philosophical and experiential understandings of the elusive, amorphous thing humans call time.

Slow Roads x Field Studies Flora Collection
Grounded in a shared reverence and affection for nature, the New York–based floral design practice Field Studies Flora, founded and led by creative director Alex Crowder, has curated a collection of art, oddities, and niche tools for Slow Roads, a shop specializing in objects rooted in time-honored traditions, techniques, and crafts. From singularly shaped magnifying glasses and copper watering cans to antique botanical models and baskets woven from the Kudzu vine, each object represents the kind of tool one might find in a floristry studio or library. To create the assemblage, Crowder says, “We considered how nature informs everything around us—not just in terms of flowers and plants, but in the objects we seek out and preserve in our homes and studios. Every object exists in service to our insatiable obsession with the natural world.” As part of the collection, Field Studies sourced seven rare books that have been bundled into two field guides: one dedicated to wildflowers and the other in celebration of grasses, sedges, rushes, and mountain laurels. Inside each title, you’ll find a library card handwritten by Crowder with the book’s source and year of publication, along with her personal musings.

As artistic director and CEO of the Aspen Art Museum, Nicola Lees is responsible for organizing some of the art world’s most socially ambitious programming from her perch high up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Previously senior curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London, curator for Frieze Projects at Frieze London, and director and curator of New York University’s 80WSE exhibition space, Lees has spent the past five years in Aspen, overseeing everything from an ensemble music performance on a mountain to an exhibition inside a silver mine. Now, following the announcement of the museum’s landmark $20 million, 10-year initiative dedicated to investing in artists as leaders, which launches this month, comes the inaugural AIR festival. The first edition—titled “Life As No One Knows It,” after a book by physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker—will debut on July 29 with a four-day lineup of performances, talks, commissions, and events featuring everyone from André 3000 and Matthew Barney to Maya Lin and Werner Herzog.

Here, we speak with Lees about her bold vision for the festival and the storied artistic legacy of this Colorado ski town.

What’s your vision for the festival? How did it come about?
I was thinking about what a contemporary art museum is, what we want it to be, and what we can ask of it. AIR is really a cornerstone of the vision for the museum itself. The museum was founded by artists in the seventies, and Aspen has this incredible history of avant-garde artists coming here. One clear example of this history is Maya Lin, who was first here in 1983 for the International Design Conference and will be returning this year for an AIR keynote talk.

Why were you motivated to launch the festival now, after five years as director?
Over the past five years, we’ve been thinking deeply about how to work with artists in more sustained and meaningful ways, beyond the traditional framework of a single commission or exhibition. Early on, we did a rooftop garden with Precious Okoyomon, which was a two-year project that had many iterations. Then there was Cauleen Smith’s unforgettable installation inside Smuggler Mine and last summer’s mountaintop concert with over twenty musicians led by Jason Moran and Ryan Trecartin.

This festival is a natural next step, and reflects the mind-body-spirit ethos that has long been part of this place, going back to the days of the International Design Conference. There’s something magical and a little wild about what happens when so many creative people come together here. The time felt right to give that energy a name and a structure.

Can you tell me more about the retreat element of AIR?
The retreat is the heart of AIR: a closed-door, interdisciplinary gathering that brings together artists, scientists, academics, and cultural thinkers to explore some of the most urgent questions of our time. This year, the conversation is shaped in part by the research of Zoë Hitzig, a Harvard economist and poet, whose work asks what it will mean to prove our humanness in an increasingly automated world. The retreat will center on the idea of “personhood credentials,” with artists leading conversations around identity, consciousness, and the rapidly evolving role of technology in our daily lives. It’s an invitation to think not only about what it means to be human, but also how we relate to one another in a time of such profound change.

While the AIR Festival will unfold over the course of a week, the retreat reflects its deeper intention: to foster long-term relationships and sustained inquiry. How people spend time together here, how relationships are built, how we can push ideas is really going to be its legacy.

Can you talk a bit more about the format?
The format of AIR builds on Aspen’s remarkable history as a gathering place for artists making magical things happen in the mountains, from Andy Warhol—who had a show in Aspen in 1955, took two thousand photographs of Colorado, and even interned at The Aspen Times—to the artists who came here in 1963 to form a summer art school that ran for three years and later became Anderson Ranch. Aspen has long been a site of experimentation. We wanted to harness that spirit and carry it forward. There is something powerful about the immediacy of live programming, the way a conversation, a performance, or a shared experience can open something up in both the artist and the audience.

I think of AIR as an investment in the subconscious. Jamieson Webster, who is participating this year, once gave a talk during Allison Katz’s exhibition “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” where she described how what we encounter on a screen doesn’t enter our subconscious in the same way as a real-life experience with an artwork or a moment of connection in a physical space. That has stayed with me.

Similarly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of this year’s AIR commission artists, has described a phenomenon where the subconscious mind becomes aware of something long before the conscious mind is willing to catch up. That idea has had a deep influence on how I think about AIR, and about the role of a contemporary art museum more broadly.

Can you speak about where the title of the festival came from?
The title “Life As No One Knows It” is borrowed from a book by Sara Imari Walker, whose work challenges us to fundamentally rethink what life is, especially as we move from a purely biological reality into one that is increasingly shaped by technology. The title also connects to the work of Paul Chan, whose practice has been a major inspiration for AIR. Paul has spent years exploring the shifting boundaries between life and death, and between human and machine. His AIR presentation will include a public conversation with an A.I. version of himself, something he has never done before. That kind of experimentation, both philosophical and technical, speaks directly to the spirit of the festival.

What do you hope AIR’s attendees and artists walk away with?
I hope people leave AIR with a kind of energy and perspective that they wouldn’t have found anywhere else, something sparked by this place, the people gathered, and the ideas explored. More than that, though, I’m interested in the moments that aren’t so easily defined or explainable, that emerge from being immersed in the mountain landscape and engaged in conversations that challenge how we think and feel.

Ideally, AIR will create a kind of feedback loop. It is not just about what happens during the week, but about something that lingers—a shift in awareness, a new connection, or a question that keeps unfolding long after.

This interview was conducted by Dalya Benor. It has been condensed and edited. Originally published on July 12, 2025, it was updated on July 16, 2025, for greater clarity.