Youth Art Expo in Aspen, Colorado
 

Youth Art Expo invited K-12 students throughout the Extended Roaring Fork Valley to engage their creativity as they reimagined spaces, buildings, and cities in response to creative prompts with no assigned limits. 

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The theme for 2025 was Architecture & Imagination with curriculum designed by our Education Team in collaboration with artist Madelon Vriesendorp, multidisciplinary artist Charlie Koolhaas, and designer, educator and nonprofit leader Maya Bird-Murphy.

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This unique biennial event encouraged students to tap into their creativity and problem-solving skills through artist-designed curricula focused on the theme of architecture and imagination. The result was a showcase of visionary and dreamlike constructions, on display at the Aspen Art Museum in the Spring of 2025. 

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Students will respond to the prompts: how can architecture be reimagined? What can you create with the resources around you? This edition of Youth Art Expo also personalizes prompts based on student interests. In response, students will repurpose often overlooked materials, fashioning them into spectacular structures and environments. Designs will range from treehouses, to community spaces, to creative interpretations of the concept of home or shelter, and will take on myriad forms, from building the highest popsicle stick tower imaginable, or cultivating a tropical garden using cardboard boxes. Student projects will unfold as drawings, models, design objects, and interactive human-scale structures to climb into or observe.

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