About Our History

Aspen Grove Fine Art. Established in Aspen, 1985.

A gallery built over decades, not seasons

Some galleries open in Aspen.

Aspen Grove Fine Arts grew here.

When Mike Olson & Lynnette Zueger- Olson established this gallery in 1985, Aspen was not yet the place it is now. The luxury corridor hadn't arrived. The global auction houses had not yet set their sights on the mountain west. What existed was something rarer: a community of artists, collectors, and true believers who understood that the American West was producing work of permanent significance, and that someone needed to hold the space for it.

Mike and Lynnette saw that vision.
Aspen Grove Fine Art has spent forty years collecting artists who forced the art world to

take something seriously that it previously underestimated.
Artists
Early Instincts

Among the gallery's earliest and most defining commitments was its relationship with Earl Biss and the artists emerging from the Institute of American Indian Arts — what those who were paying attention came to call the Miracle Generation. At a moment when the broader art world was slow to recognize the full force of this movement, Aspen Grove was already in the room, already in conversation, already placing those works in the hands of collectors who would steward them for generations.

Biss's work — unmistakably now known as American Impressionism — was among the earliest proof that the gallery's instincts were right. It remains in the program today.

One hangs permanently at the Caribou Club — which tells you everything about where Biss stands in the story of Aspen history.

VIEW OUR EARL BISS COLLECTION
THE FOUNDATION

Every artist in our galleries history arrived before the consensus did.

Biss and the IAIA generation before Contemporary Native Art was recognized as a movement. Neiman and Kaufman before sport and pop culture were admitted to the fine art canon. Peter Max before psychedelic poster art had any business hanging in a museum. Singleton before anyone believed a sharecropper's son from rural Missouri could produce spiritual sculpture significant enough to be carried by three successive Popes. And Frederick Hart before the art world was willing to admit that figurative sculpture - the oldest discipline in the human story - still had something left to say.
THE VISION FOR THE NEXT 40 YEARS

The same instinct that guided those decisions is the one driving the program today — applied to a new generation of artists whose careers are still being written.

Hamilton Aguiar bends light with oil. Devon Stanfield brings his lineage of Pop art into a storytelling vision. David Riley is breaking barriers of contemporary western painting. Anke Schofield's work carries an intimacy that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake. And Ashley Collins — newly introduced to the program — is exactly the kind of artist this gallery has always moved toward; true to her vision with no one telling her what to paint.

The names are different. The standard is the same.
EXPLORE OUR COLLECTION