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\n\tThe Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a five-acre complex of studios and artist housing in Snowmass, Colorado, that offers workshops and residencies, is often called a maker\u2019s paradise. You understand that moniker upon arrival: Once you get over the 8,000-foot elevation, you feel energized, breathe in the crisp air, behold your bucolic surroundings\u2014mountains dotted with the watching eyes of aspens\u2014and want to revel in making something, even something as banal as your morning coffee.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhen I was at the Ranch in mid-July for its 60th-anniversary celebrations, for which ARTnews<\/em> was a media sponsor, that crisp air had a threatening edge, that crisp air had a threatening edge: It was so dry it seemed like you could start a fire simply by thinking about one. Dry enough that the arrow on the daily fire danger rating board outside the Snowmass Wildcat fire station had swung all the way into red (\u201cextreme\u201d). Dry enough that the Ranch\u2019s artists needed special permission to fire up the kiln. Dry enough that the first five letters of the dress code for the annual gala\u2014\u201cSparkle\u201d\u2014formed a word that sounded almost transgressive.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Ranch is situated nine miles away from Aspen in a kind of holy trinity with the local fire station and the local chapel, each side of the triangle about the length of a football field. \u201cIt\u2019s mind, body, spirit,\u201d Ranch president Peter Waanders told me. The studios and workshops are arranged such that artists are encouraged to move among them\u2014a painter to the ceramics studio, a ceramics artist to photography. The more I learned about the Ranch, the more I thought of it as synonymous with artistic fluidity, a kind of freedom. Its founder, Paul Soldner, was one of the ceramics practitioners in the 1960s who, like Peter Voulkos, his teacher, freed the clay arts from their strict association with traditional pots and other vessels; he pioneered a new form of Japanese raku that came to be known as American raku.<\/p>\n \n\tThe importance of making to the human spirit is baked into the Ranch\u2019s origin story. Soldner would never have created the Ranch if he hadn\u2019t become an artist, and he might never have become an artist had a prisoner of Austria\u2019s Mauthausen concentration camp not made charcoal drawings on the walls of his cell. As a young medic in the US, Soldner saw those drawings when his division liberated the camp. Although he\u2019d started taking photographs during his service, he\u2019d planned on becoming a doctor upon his return to America but, his daughter said in a recent lecture, those drawings pushed him in the direction of art. He pursued ceramics; in 1966, he created Anderson Ranch.<\/p>\n \n\tBack then, the Ranch was, as veterans of the place have recalled, little more than a kiln in a field. Over the years, a hot tub Soldner jerry-rigged on the grounds has become a metaphor for what the place was like in the early days. \u201cThere was a lot going on in the hot tub other than hot tubbing,\u201d artist Lee Lyon said in an interview in 2012. Waanders told me that about an artist who visited recently recalled driving out to the Ranch in those old days, when there wasn\u2019t a single tree on the property, sleeping in his car, and showering with the garden hose outside the shed. Even after it started to professionalize in the 1970s and \u201980s\u2014women were told they had to wear bras and the infamous hot tub was dismantled\u2014the Ranch still saw plenty of colorful characters. Caleb Bach, an early director, \u201cwas once a CIA agent in Argentina, and his cover was being an artist,\u201d an artist related in a book devoted to the Ranch\u2019s history. \u201cHe painted for years, waiting for a Russian director that never arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSince then, the Ranch has grown\u2014and grown some more. Its operating budget, according to the most recent filings, is $7.6 million; Waanders told me the current endowment is around $17 million. In the \u201980s, there were around 175 students per summer. Now, the Ranch operates year-round, and there are over 1,200 students. This summer, Waanders said, has seen the highest enrollment of students in the history of the Ranch. As for facilities, there\u2019s a high-tech digital fabrication lab, state-of-the-art printers (3D and otherwise), a scholarship program, and a robust visiting artist program.<\/p>\n \n\tAspen and the area around it have also changed. The average home price in Aspen and its environs is $14 million. I was told that there is a saying: If you live in Aspen you either have three homes (the other two in, say, New York and Palm Beach) or three jobs. A few years ago, Richard Carter, an Aspen-based artist who was around during the early Ranch days, told a local newspaper, \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0not like it used to be. I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have studio assistants anymore; they had to move. I had an incredibly talented carpenter\u00a0I\u2019ve\u00a0worked with for years who had to leave because he\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0afford it here anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAnderson Ranch is in an interesting position today: Even as it seeks to be in dialogue with the contemporary art world, what the people in the contemporary art world value about it is its separateness from the rest of that world they inhabit. Curator Helen Molesworth has said that she loved the lack of the kind of politics she\u2019d experienced in museums and \u201cthe Utopian summer-camp vibe of \u2018we\u2019re all just here making stuff together.\u2019\u201d One of the Ranch\u2019s strengths, she said, is its heterogeneity: \u201cYou have everyone from Simone Leigh to a Sunday painter. If you put art-making at the center\u2026 all of those divisions fall away, and we can have different kinds of conversations.\u201d Waanders told me he loves the fact that the Ranch is somewhere you can see a billionaire sitting next to a scholarship student, both of them learning how to paint with watercolors.<\/p>\n \n\tWaanders came to Anderson Ranch in 2019 from the Aspen Institute, where he was the director for the Society of Fellows and expanded its reach to year-round events in cities around the US. Unlike most of his predecessors, he is not an artist, but he\u2019s been involved in the arts and ideas world in Aspen for 25 years, long enough to know some of the early Ranch artists. When he was first hired he was to work alongside a rotating curator in residence, but after bringing in Molesworth for a couple years and then Douglas Fogle, he has since dropped that role, having determined that his core staff has gotten as much as they could have from such guidance.<\/p>\n \n\tSix years into his tenure, Waanders has already outlasted all but two of the Ranch\u2019s 13 previous directors. He told me he sees his mandate as building a new foundation for the Ranch to stand on while preserving its history and \u201cthe relationships that got us to where we are\u201d\u2014essentially, how to professionalize while keeping the spirit of the place.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve grown, which was one of my goals when I came,\u201d Waanders told me in his office, fancy for the Ranch but still rustic. Over the past five years, the endowment has gone up by about $7 million. \u201cAbout half of that is that the market keeps going up,\u201d he said. \u201cBut some has been really generous gifts.\u201d Earlier this year, the Ranch launched the Marie Figge Wise Master Printer-in-Residence fund and position, which will help maintain its Printmaking and Editions program with a gift from the William and Marie Wise Family Foundation. He told me that the Ranch just got invited to be a member of the IFPDA, the International Fine Prints & Drawings Association. Ranch president of artistic affairs Andrea Jenkins Wallace, who has been on staff for 18 years, told me that despite being larger more professionalized than ever, the place is still flexible. \u201cWe\u2019re still very nimble\u2026It\u2019s not so big that we can\u2019t just say, okay, let\u2019s just do\u201d this or that program.<\/p>\n \n\tWaanders said he\u2019s looking at the next 10 to 20 years in both material and immaterial terms, with a focus on ongoing renovation and updating of its facilities and continuing efforts in thought leadership. \u201cOne mantra in the back of my head is I don\u2019t want to lose what\u2019s really special about this place,\u201d he said. Pointing to a photograph of Dennis Hopper using then-new Photoshop software at the Ranch in 1995, Waanders said part of that includes investing in technology. \u201cAmong our peers, we were really early [in digital fabrication] and ours is integrated across all of our studios. That investment in technology is a constant drive, and technology has become more and more expensive.\u201d The Ranch\u2019s advanced CNC machines cost up to a quarter-million dollars. \u201cI want to make sure we continue to be on that edge that is melding craft and fine art.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe is also dealing with aging infrastructure. \u201cOur campus was mostly built in the \u201980s and \u201990s, so all of my boilers are 40 years old,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s time for us to look at the campus and what it is going to be.\u201d There also needs to be a big investment in the photography and new media facilities, which will probably involve replacing the existing building.<\/p>\n \n\tAs for thought leadership, Waanders wants to continue having seminars on such subjects as the role of public art and issues related to race, class, and gender in the arts. \u201cWe\u2019re going to invest a lot in building a seminar space and really lean into what\u2019s going on in the art world and how collectors understand art as an artist\u2019s intention versus art as a commodity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \n\tThe annual summertime gala week is an important time for the Ranch in terms of fundraising. The gala typically brings in a little less than a third of the money, Waanders told me, with the rest coming from \u201cnational council and major giving.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tGalas can be jarring at every art institution, where spaces typically populated by parents with strollers and senior citizens shuffling around are taken over by monied donors in all their finery. The contrast is even starker at the Ranch. Waanders, in our interview, drew a distinction between the Ranch and institutions in nearby Aspen, where \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of diamonds and champagne glasses.\u201d Here, he said, \u201cyou walk around in flats in the gravel and drink beer out of a bottle.\u201d Still, there was much pomp and circumstance at the gala in July, and many thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of clothing and jewelry plus plenty of vertiginous heels negotiating with the gravel. At a live auction, more than $1.6 million was raised for scholarships and programming, with the year\u2019s artist honoree, Marilyn Minter, generously agreeing to donate not one but two portrait sessions to winning bidders. At one point I looked toward the back of the room and saw one of the artists I\u2019d been with at an hours-long crit I\u2019d sat in on earlier in the day, dressed very much at odds with the \u201csparkle\u201d theme, hovering at the margins looking a bit bemused. The portion of the menu that made the most sense was the dessert: lowly doughnuts cut in half and fashioned into rainbows that captured the can-do spirit of the Ranch, the transforming of humble materials into something really special.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/anderson-ranch-arts-center-60th-anniversary-1234797168\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/20260715_RANCH_GALA-19.jpg?w=1024″] The Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a five-acre complex of studios and artist housing in Snowmass, Colorado, that offers workshops and residencies, is often called a maker\u2019s paradise. You understand that moniker upon arrival: Once you get over the 8,000-foot elevation, you feel energized, breathe in the crisp air, behold your bucolic surroundings\u2014mountains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2129140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2129140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2129140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2129140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2129140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}