For decades, the Art World has existed in the collective psyche in a separate sphere from the Real World. As it stands, the proper-noun-Art World has been justifiably synonymous with the idea of sequestration. Those who have traversed the Art World aren’t known to be frequent visitors of the Real World, and vice versa. The strange perversion of this separate sphere ideology has long been a fixation of those who do frequent both sides. After all, what is art without reality? What is the real world without art? Business, semantics, and the exhaustive question of capital have long clouded the marriage of the artistic sphere and the so-called hard-knock material realm. In recent years, numerous actors have endeavored to bridge the chasm between realms. Becca Hoffman, longtime director of New York’s Outsider Art Fair, co-founder and director of The Aspen Art Fair and founder of 74tharts, is one of them.

At its core, Hoffman’s 74tharts aims to “push the boundaries of traditional art fair models [by] offering a full slate of cultural opportunities; ” a seemingly lofty goal for any other institution that got its start a mere year ago, but Hoffman is no stranger to the boundary-pushing agenda. Becca Hoffman has crafted a decades long career of community-based art direction. After serving as director of the aforementioned Outsider Art Fair (a biannual event dedicated to exhibiting artists on the fringes and outside of the hallowed halls of the artistic Institution), Hoffman facilitated a series of online and in-person fairs for Intersect Art and Design, working within the confines of the pandemic to nurture opportunities for artists within and outside Aspen and Palm Springs. Again and again, Hoffman faced the reality that well outside of the globalized art capitol cities, creative groups bubbled– there were entire artistic networks ripe to be inducted into the commercially viable art circuit, and vice versa.

Hence, 74tharts. Hence, The Aspen Art Fair. This August, hundreds flocked to Aspen to enjoy the inaugural fair, co-directed by Hoffman and Aspen’s Hexton Gallery founder Bob Chase. The fair, hosted on the first floor of Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, included a series of international artist-in-residence projects, film screenings, early morning hikes, cold plunges, and artist prizes. Bay Area-based multimedia artist Masako Miki was the recipient of the fair’s Anderson Ranch Visiting Artist Prize. The event, as Hoffman describes it, was an enormous success—one that felt like a significant step towards ingratiating the Aspen community into the larger envelope of art-world cities.

With a specific focus on engagement— that between the art and the audience, that between the buyer and the artist, that between the land and its visitor— Becca Hoffman will continue to make the bounds into terroirs previously unexplored by the international art community. After the success of The Aspen Art Fair, 74tharts will launch Influencers in Milan this October, an exploration of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Hepworth, Carol Rama, Cindy Sherman.  curated by Maya Binkin. 

For now, Becca Hoffman sits with FLAUNT to talk The Aspen Art Fair, 74tharts, and the limitlessness of community.

I wanted to congratulate you on a successful Aspen Art Fair. I heard it went well. 

It was a great event. It exceeded our expectations—from gallery sales, to press, to energy in town, to attendance, to support from the Hotel Jerome and Auberge Resorts. It truly was the perfect first year. 

Let’s talk about the partnership with Hotel Jerome, because it made me think about hospitality at the intersection of art curation. Where do you draw elements of hospitality into your job as a director and curator, specifically with the Aspen Art Fair?  

We're all in the customer service business at the end of the day. That's the hospitality business in a nutshell. In Aspen, being able to respond to the needs of the community, support the community, and provide the community with a distinct citywide cultural event allowed us to participate in the hospitality conversation. For customers who come back every year, we provided them with tours of the fair and access to our VIP program.We really wanted to be present, from the educational side to the supporting side to the fun side, and to open up the eyes of both people on campus who didn't know who we were and people who did know who we were.  

How are you measuring success throughout each year that you're throwing an Aspen art project, and how does that look different? 

In 2020, we were virtual, and that was the year when the art world fully got behind what it meant to buy art online. 2021 was the year when everybody needed to celebrate since we were all free again. We saw that in Aspen, we saw it with the evolution of pop-ups. We saw everybody wanting to invest in art. In 2022, we saw: Oh my God, you can go to Europe again. That was really exciting, so there was a little bit less of the same fury for purchasing. 2023 really leveled out. 

What I'd say about this past year is that we've really solidified Aspen as a summertime arts destination, not just for American art collectors, but for people from around the world. I was on the phone with one of my galleries from London this morning, Ronchini, who was so over the moon because they sold a series of pieces for over six figures. The people I met in Aspen this year and reconnected with are people I see in New York, Paris,  Miami, Los Angeles, and London, but I got to sit down and chat with them. So what I'd say is that apart from solidifying Aspen as growing, it's a unique space for collectors, gallerists, curators, and art enthusiasts to engage on the whole.  

How are you going to maintain that sense of intimacy and communication between both the artists and the people who are attending the fair?

One of my favorite things I did was lead women-walking-and-talking hikes. I love to be outside. I love to hike. It was an opportunity for our gallerists, our collectors, and our artists to come out and experience nature, which is so different from being in a bar, being at someone's house, or being in the context of an art fair. So that really continued a sense of intimacy. Bob, my co-founder, took gallerists and collectors on morning daily cold river plunges. That is not for me. I get cold when it's 90 degrees out, but he loves it. 

So we are trying to create that sense of intimacy by making sure that we provide that opportunity for activity and engagement in nature. Also, the artist residencies that we were able to achieve this year were a really meaningful way for people to engage with artists and watch the process. How often do you get to go to an art fair and see somebody creating something right there and in a dedicated space?  

That's a really meaningful way to help people understand the process and understand the person who's creating the art that they're interested in. 

Correct. At the end of the day, what we did this year in Aspen—and what we plan to do in the future—is meant to be an art, design, lifestyle, luxury, and takeover of a hospitality destination. It's meant to stimulate the senses from nature to educate the brain with conversations like that with Josh Baer or film screenings and to tantalize what you wish you could have with the home tours. It's really meant to expand outwards, and I affectionately call it an adult art fair summer camp because it is really where everybody gets to know each other. It becomes a really special moment.  

How do you continue to make the divide between insider/outsider (something that seems to always exist in creative fields) a little bit more transparent? 

Running the Outsider Art Fair taught me that we put things in too many boxes. It's all about creativity. How do we open up those boxes and let them flow? That's why we want to showcase so many different forms of creativity. The other thing I'd say is the Outsider Art Fair was the prime example of letting your freak flag fly in a meaningful manner, but what we were able to do with the Outsider Art Fair that I'm continuing here in Aspen is ideally providing opportunities for our audience, our galleries, and our collectors to have something different, to have a different form of connection and commerce and engagement and education. That's ultimately what we're trying to do. How do we shape things up but bring things close to home?

That seems to be a central tenet of 74tharts. You’ve talked about how it “embraces belief in the world's interconnectedness,” and I'm wondering, in the first nascent year of 74tharts, how have you seen it growing in a direction that you're surprised or excited by?  

What's exciting is the number of people that keep talking to me about new cities and the fact that people are understanding what we're trying to do with 74tharts, that we're trying to rethink, and that it's meant to be something that stimulates the senses. It's fun to propose different cities that are open to a local and regional stimulation of the region with a global scale. From proposing Vancouver to Lisbon to Tangier to Charleston to Munich to Bangkok, there are some interesting experiences there. 

When you break down the boundaries of just being a built-wall art fair, for a citywide cultural event, the people come out of the woodwork to say, “Hey, I'd like to talk about showcasing this form of my creativity. What do you think?” In Marseille next summer, there's somebody who's going to teach people about the history of oysters and how to paint on oyster shells, because he's so excited about what they have meant to the city and that would have been quite a few extra steps if we were doing that in an art fair context. We're working with one of our restaurant partners in Singapore because Singapore is all about art, food, design, culture, culinary crossroads, and cocktails. One of our food partners is talking about being inspired by traditional Chinese tea ceremonies and how to pair food with that and how to pair contemporary Chinese performance. Those are the ideas that really get me excited, and it's giving me such hope because this is what I want to use 74tharts for. 

Do you feel a genuine shift towards an invigorated interest in women's stories, not just in the Aspen Art Fair, but in this general realm that you're talking about? 

One hundred and fifty percent. It is one of my personal core tenets to build women up, support women, and help them grow. I think there's so much out there that we need to showcase and support. And we can highlight it, and the more that we give platforms to people, the better off everybody and society is.  

How have you learned to navigate telling a story out of a collection of other stories? 

I'm the quintessential extrovert. I feed off of people's energy. I embrace it, I learn from it, and I'm able to promote it to the world. So in hearing a story that's meaningful, I'm able to digest it and really support it. Additionally, when I talk about the world being a small place, I firmly think that my global nomadism, living between New York and France and spending a lot of time around the world, gives you a traveler's outlook so you can digest a story in a different manner and really help that grow.  

It's almost a science in a way.  

A hundred percent. It is completely and totally a science. It's really about learning and hearing. We spend so much of our lives hearing but not listening. If you listen and you provide somebody the opportunity for a springboard, you're only going to help them grow.