The Brooklyn Rail

In Aspen, wealth—despite its many associations—is measured most by the quality of perception. Moneyed transients, skimming the surface, often mark their arrivals with pricey lunch reservations and bulimic shopping sprees. Locals and privileged transcendentalists know better. Their wisdom is simple: breathe. Breathe in the intoxicating air; take deep, greedy gulps, then find a place to sit—preferably without shoes. This advice is regenerative, heart-affirming, because in Aspen, health is the order of the day. Why squander cash on bottled water when the town’s tap is scandalously pure? And why rush to sit in crowded spaces when the surrounding mountains offer prayer and privacy?

Though Aspen has remained an international hub for decades, the glamour promoted by consumerist pride and glossy advertising is, in truth, pitifully thin. The true locus of Aspen’s abundance is nature herself. On Saturdays, the local farmers’ market distills that ethos: fewer things, chosen cautiously, each carrying the mark of its maker. This same reverence for the essential—stripped of excess yet rich in resonance—threads through the Aspen Art Museum under curator Claude Adjil’s direction. Her gaze is both hospitable and exacting—prioritizing rhythm, cyclical recurrence, and dramatic intuition. She resists the churn of spectacle in favor of exhibitions that, in her words, “invite us to think across times and temporalities,” to “marvel at the worlds an artist weaves” and feel the beauty of the “suspended states” they create. For Adjil, success is never measured in numbers, but in the depth of that encounter.

Our current art market is said to be in transition—some call it a contraction, others a decline, though most forecasts are steeped in fear-mongering and gloom. Aspen advances another theory: that only what softens and humanizes life will endure. Reality is the only museum that matters, and the appetite for fewer, finer works is not a retreat, but a return to a more primordial way of seeing. Nowhere is this more vividly embodied than in Catch the sun with your hand, Solange Pessoa’s latest exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum.

It begins by rewinding time. Emerging from the walls like Amazons from an earlier earth, Florasceas (2019), a procession of nine vessels, signals our entry into the nether realm of ancient goddess cults. They recall those lauded Delphic omphalos stones, marvels of a sovereignty long receded. Haughty, slightly austere, they stand beyond the fickle criteria of “Beauty” so deeply imposed upon “Art.” Faceless and eyeless, the bulbous, embryonic vessels suggest a hive-like structure, guarding nature’s deepest secrets. They seem to extend not from the wall, but from the deepest, blackest soil. Much like cave paintings, which were never made to be seen, let alone sold, ceramic art, Pessoa reminds us, was once exclusively women’s domain. In archaeologist Victor W. von Hagen’s The World of the Maya, he says:

It was only after the introduction of the potter’s wheel that pottery became—as the drawings on the walls of Thebes show—exclusively masculine. This suggests that all superbly beautiful patterns found on pottery were conceived by women. Perhaps, then, art herself is a woman.

“Perhaps” is too choice a word; “certainly,” under Pessoa’s care, feels more apt. Her work reflects the supremacy of ceramic technology. In one vessel, a circular opening reveals a dense, tangled mass of fibrous matter—dark, womb-like—that spills slightly beyond the cavity. Its terracotta surface bears the imperfections of hand and kiln, holding the warmth of something once touched by fire. The shadow it casts doubles its form, elongating it into an apparition. By the time one reaches the end, there are more questions than answers, and the mind finds itself circling back in an old, spiral pattern, where thought and feeling refuse separation, each bound in turn to a lingering caress of the spiritual.

In the next room, Pessoa shifts the register. Refuting genre and dismantling rationalist contempt for myth, she summons the Moon Mother’s formidable clarity. Delíria Deveras (2021–24)—a wide bed of clear quartz, jagged and clouded by mineral scars—transforms the gallery into a shrine of light. Scattered across the crystals are small, highly polished silver forms whose reflective skins recall seeds, pods, even hands. The contrast between rough mineral bed and sleek metal reveals two tempos of time: geological patience and human intervention. The work’s twenty-two tons of crystal were sourced from Minas Gerais, a colonial Brazilian town with a long history of mining and extraction—a history that resonated with Aspen’s own silver-mining past and made it, in Adjil’s words, a “natural fit” for the Roaring Fork Valley.

Pessoa’s Bags—Aspen Version (1994–2025) extends this rootedness further. For this iteration, the earth materials that fill the linen sacks were locally sourced from nearby ranches and farms, creating what Adjil calls “a bridge between the work and the singular environment of western Colorado.” Hung in vertical columns, each swollen with brittle herbs, clumps of earth, smooth river stones, or hunks of mineral faintly flashing in the light, the sacks become votive offerings. Some, heavy with abundance, spill their treasures, and among the silken dirt visitors are invited to take what they wish. Like the Earth Mother, Pessoa gives and gives and gives, recycling herself endlessly. I leave with a stick of cinnamon and a poem in Portuguese:

Only your hand on my shoulders.
And a large piece of heaven opens.
I breathe deeply. And I move away
from myself — into the distance. I become calm.

On the rooftop, where NIHL NOVI SUB SOLE (2019–21) rests, the calm is almost overbearing. Pessoa’s carved soapstones sit like meteorites from a future past, absorbing the last of the sun. Children run between them, some tracing their surfaces, others trying to push them closer to the light. The Aspen skyline stretches wide—blue air, green slopes, ridgelines scalloped with trees—but Pessoa’s stones feel older than all of it, as if they had fallen here to remind us of something we once knew: that endurance is its own kind of beauty.