As a Denver kid in the 1970s, Keith Mayerson thought Aspen was Xanadu.
The ski areas were out of this world, the moguls were perfect. The town abounded with artists and attracted residents like John Denver and Hunter S. Thompson. “It was also a place where people could really be free and one with nature, but also, have political points of view. It seemed very liberal and bohemian,” Mayerson said. “It seemed like heaven on earth.”
Since 2001, Mayerson has been cultivating a series he calls “My American Dream,” more than 140 oil paintings of cultural icons, inspiring landscapes, important events and personal moments that all hearken back to his vision of utopia.
He’s been a professional artist for most of his life, mounting shows at major museums in New York and Los Angeles, Berlin, Hong Kong, Brussels and Amsterdam. For his new show, though, Mayerson is bringing it to his home state for the first time.
“My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High),” opens Sunday at the Aspen Art Museum, and runs through May 31.
Whose American Dream?
The title of his show — “My American Dream” — is a double entendre, with the first meaning located in the word “dream.” The son of a psychoanalyst, his shows are what he calls “nonlinear narratives,” sequences of images that appear “dreamlike and episodic, without any sort of beginning, middle and end.”
The other meaning is, of course, tied up in the mythology of the American dream, the grand image of a big house with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids, Mayerson said.
Artist Keith Mayerson’s ski passes from the 1980s, which he reproduced in paintings for the upcoming exhibition, “My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High),” at the Aspen Art Museum. (Photo provided by Keith Mayerson)That version was never quite what he, “a queer individual who’s married to a part-Indigenous, Latino husband living our artistic bohemian life,” had dreamed of. Mayerson’s vision was “more the American dream of a plurality of people of all denominations, ethnicities and class levels with equal opportunity for everyone working hard to get what they want, and living a joyful and happy and peaceful existence, in a nation that is about optimism, hope, democracy-with-a-small-d, and taking care of the people on Earth,” he said.
And when did his Dream-with-a-capital-d start? Sept. 11, 2001.
Mayerson was living about 15 blocks from the World Trade Center and about to leave to teach an art class at New York University when he heard the first plane fly overhead. He turned on the news then stared up at the hole in the tower from outside his apartment. Unsure of what to do, he headed to class.
Things were too tense to talk about comics, so he took his students out to nearby Washington Square Park to sketch what they were seeing. That’s when the first tower fell.
It would be six years before Mayerson could bring himself to paint directly about that day — his piece, “9-11,” is in the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection — but it sparked the series that would become “My American Dream.”
“Friends of mine were making these sort of ‘Bush is bad’ paintings,” he said, referring to then President George W. Bush. “I just wanted to make things that made me feel optimistic about our country. The landscapes, my family, civil rights heroes, cultural icons that deeply inspired me growing up.”
Snoopy as Buddha
Mayerson credits “the Aspen Idea,” a 1950s vision of the world that integrates physical, mental and cultural stimulation, for his well-rounded childhood. The ideas of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, founders of the Aspen Institute, had trickled down to his home in Greenwood Village. He lived in “a kumbaya kind of world,” he said.
His parents emphasized the outdoors, and the family spent weekends together skiing and hiking. His dad continued skiing until just a couple of years ago, retiring at age 90, Mayerson said proudly.
Artist Keith Mayerson atop Aspen’s Highlands bowl in 2025. Mayerson visited Aspen to ski and take photos, which he turned into paintings, for his upcoming show at the Aspen Art Museum. (Photo provided by Keith Mayerson)After graduating from Cherry Creek High School, Mayerson chased the dream of becoming a comic strip illustrator straight into the fine arts, and meshed the two disciplines in a series of teaching gigs. He taught comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and fine arts at Columbia, Yale and Brown. He also helped launch the Visual Narrative Art program at the University of Southern California, where he works now, all the while weaving comic characters and references into his oil paintings.
You’re as likely to find Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley and Martin Luther King in his shows as you are Superman or Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz’s famously chill beagle that Mayerson has called “a nondenominational Buddha.”
While Mayerson adamantly avoids tying his more ephemeral statements to any religion (he saw god in the clouds last time he skied Aspen, he said, quickly adding, “in a nondenominational way”), his reverence for Schulz and Muppets creator Jim Henson is palpable.
Comics were his way into the art world as a kid, he explained. So while some of his current references are tied up in nostalgia, it’s their messages of empathy and compassion that remain relevant.
For the Aspen show, Mayerson is creating a new set of paintings based on photographs that he either took himself from the mountaintops, or dug up from the town archives. There are images of silver miners at Smuggler’s Mine, a 1971 crowd at Wagner Park, his own 1980s ski passes from Copper Mountain, and an album cover of John Denver and the Muppets.
He paints from photos, but doesn’t aim for photorealism, laying grids on the canvases and then playing music to help guide the experience.
“Aspen Poster, Bill C. Brown, 1980,” oil on linen by Keith Mayerson. (Photo provided by Keith Mayerson and Karma)“It’s a lot like skiing,” Mayerson said. “Your mind is in its own meditative space and your body’s sort of doing its thing. And when I paint, it’s very much, I feel like I’m going into that space. Instead of my knees going up and down over the slopes, my brush is.”
The last time Mayerson skied Aspen — before returning last year to take photos for his new paintings — was in 1993. A grad school student who’d just started to exhibit his own work, he flew out to celebrate his dad’s 60th birthday. Mayerson will celebrate his own 60th birthday during the exhibition run.
“It’s definitely a homecoming,” he said. “At age 60, I feel like I’m finally coming home.”
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