Aspen Art Museum

Originally trained as a linguist, Kay Rosen is internationally renowned for her language-based paintings, drawings, and public installations. Borrowing strategies from the world of advertising and design as well as fine art, Rosen’s manipulations and juxtapositions highlight the inherent fluidity of language, creating surprising double and triple entendres. As she explained in a 2010 interview: “When it comes to reading my work, throw out all the rules you ever learned: spelling, spacing, capitalization, margins, linear reading, composition…all your old reading habits will be useless.”

For the AAM Future Home, Rosen created a new work specifically for the covered sidewalk that wrapped around the Spring and Hyman Street sides of the site. Playing on the anagrammatic relationship between the words “PEEK” and “KEEP” (each word spells the other when read backward), Rosen’s installation simultaneously asked passersby to KEEP OUT, as well as to PEEK IN, humorously acknowledging the need for safety while also encouraging curiosity.