The 21st annual Aspen Ideas Festival begins Wednesday night and runs through Tuesday, July 1.
As the Aspen Institute celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, Graham Veysey, the festival’s executive director and producer, looked at how to pay tribute to the Aspen Idea — the integration of mind, body and spirit — and those who pioneered it.
One way festival staff are trying to honor the past is through arts programming.
This weekend, an art installation at Anderson Park will be dedicated to Elizabeth Paepcke, who fell in love with Aspen and rallied behind the Goethe Bicentennial, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and the Aspen Music Festival and School. These three institutions were key components of the early Aspen idea.
Arts & Culture Reporter Regan Mertz sat down with Veysey to talk about what to expect at this year’s festival.
The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
Regan Mertz: With this being the 21st year of the Aspen Ideas Festival, can you talk to me about how the festival has spirited the Aspen Institute and embodied the Aspen Idea over the last two decades?
Graham Veysey: So, the Aspen Ideas Festival is the largest public program of the Aspen Institute. We have panel discussions and dialogs, we've got round tables, we've got workshops, we've got field trips, and our theme this year is timeless questions. It really harkens back to that original convening in 1949, in the same meadow that we put on the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2025.
But we also have a number of things that happen that the public, — if you missed out on buying a pass — there's Evenings at Ideas. We're doing a night at Wheeler Opera House on the 26th. On the 25th, we're inviting people for Theater of War, a staged reading of the 19th century play “An Enemy of the People,” about trust and public health. So, there's a lot of things that people who are listening to us now can still be involved with, even though we’ve sold out of Fest 1 and Fest 2.
Mertz: Something that I saw was the flower installation that reimagines Elizabeth Paepcke.
Could you talk to me a little bit more about that installation and why this year?
Veysey: So, as part of the 75th anniversary, we're looking at the people who made the Aspen Institute happen, and it wouldn't have happened without Elizabeth Paepcke. She fell in love with the charm of the valley and the fabric of the former silver mining town, and convinced her husband to come check it out.
That really helped set into motion what would become the Goethe Bicentennial, and then the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and the Aspen Music Festival and School.
Elizabeth had a love of nature. She had a love of wildflowers. As a tribute to her on June 27, 28, and 29, the Australian artist CJ Henry is going to be doing a large-scale installation in Anderson Park. And each day there will be 5,000 zero-waste inflatable flowers planted that attendees can actually pick and bring home with them.
Mertz: You talked about themes of public health and trust — this idea of asking questions. And some of the other themes I noticed were democracy and politics, AI, immigration, freedom of the press.
Could you talk to me about those tracks?
Veysey: You mentioned the politics. That's a track that we call “The Just Society.” We've got governors from Georgia and Maryland, Republicans and Democrats. We've got sitting U.S. senators, but then we also have experts on the judiciary talking about the Supreme Court cases coming out.
We've got “Planet in Transition,” which is our conversation around the environment and energy.
We've got “The Global Contract.” And so, we've got former ambassadors to the UN John Bolton and Susan Rice in conversation with David Petraeus, the four-star general that was also the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. So, it's that multidisciplinary approach to ideas that is one of the defining parts of the Aspen Institute ethos.
Mertz: I think something that came up a lot that I wanted to mention is the change of administration. But is that something that you had to consider with topics this year, or the speakers that you wanted to bring in?
Veysey: So, the change of administrations happened a number of times over the last 21 years, and over the last 75 years. The Aspen Institute is a non-partisan organization, so we take that same approach in terms of how we program the festival. And we always work to have all the perspectives on stage, because when you have those perspectives, you do find commonality.
Our long-format dialog — we're not about sound bites. It's not just a five-minute conversation, like you see on cable news. It's 50-minute dialogues. We even have one block of time during the day that's 80 minutes.
We'll have high-ranking members of the Trump administration. We'll have Brian Kemp, who's the Republican governor of Georgia. We'll have Wes Moore, who's the Democratic governor of Maryland. So, we bring all these perspectives to the stages so that those long-format dialogs can lead to a mutual respect and that commonality that we strive for.
Editor’s Note: Aspen Public Radio is broadcasting live and taped sessions from the Aspen Ideas Festival weekdays until Tuesday, July 1.
