Kelly Akashi participates in Aspen Art Museum's ArtCrush 2026 Live Auction

27 July 2026

On 31 July 2026, Kelly Akashi's work Aspen Daisy Chain, 2026 will be featured in the Aspen Art Museum's ArtCrush 2026 Live Auction. Akashi’s featured work employs elements which deepen her ongoing exploration of time, impermanence and the relationship between the human and natural worlds.

Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Kelly Akashi’s visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. Always a student, Akashi is perpetually studying new practices and physical techniques such as glass-blowing, photography, metal and crystal casting, print making, and stone carving. The repeated use of her own body, her hands, torso, face or full figure, serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience bearing the mark of time on her body, her changing form and flesh. Ever present in her practice is Akashi’s exploration of local ecologies, featuring meticulously sculpted glass flowers or deftly rendered cast bronze seed pods. With these renderings, she emphasizes both the fragility and magnitude of the natural world and one’s own existence within the vast cosmos.

Explore more via Aspen Art Museum.

Image: Kelly Akashi, Aspen Daisy Chain, 2026. © Kelly Akashi, Courtesy Lisson. Photo: Paul Salveson.