How a Utah Ski Resort Plans to Incorporate Art Into Its Massive Footprint

Powder Mountain, Utah is tuning it's slopes into an open-air art museum . With works from iconic artists including Jenny Holzer, Paul McCarthy, James Turrell, Arthur Jafa, and Nancy Holt.

Watch a short video detailing one of the works, titled Relay (2023), below.

We checked in with Powder Mountain’s Chief Creative Officer Alex Zhang to find out how this will affect skiers, how this art museum is being put into place, and how this decision came to be in the first place.

Zhang reported that he had been visiting and skiing at Powder Mountain for the last ten years. "I have always loved the Ogden Valley and that specific mountain," Zhang admitted. "I just kept going back with friends and when they would do events there, and I loved it." Then, Zhang left and moved to New York.

But his story and relationship with Powder Mountain was far from over. Reed Hastings purchased Powder Mountain. "We got connected. This big question kept coming up because clearly the previous model of Powder Mountain as an independent local ski resort wasn't working, in terms of its financial model."

Zhang and the Powder Mountain team wondered, "what could we do differently? What did this look like?" Zhang admitted the ideas to save the soul of Powder, while still allowing it to succeed financially, varied from more common models of opening up the resort to Epic or Ikon pass holders, or building more restaurants and hotels to achieve higher volumes of visitors. But, ultimately, the resort owner and team settled for a more boutique solution.

"Maybe it turns off a certain demographic, but hopefully it really turns on another demographic and creates something more niche. Our philosophy is that if you build something niche, it will attract a certain type of person even more strongly than trying to appeal to the masses."

Even though there are some building components to the new owners' plans, above all else, Zhang and the team plan to "preserve the local ski resort we all know and love, including the local tradition and the heritage."

This evolved into the question of what would a ski resort sort of look like if it were designed by artists? Zhang explained, "it's something fun we kept coming back to. This idea that throughout history, artists and art has always played an amazing role in helping create the identity of a place."

Zhang pointed to the founding of Aspen. "Aspen started as a mountain town financed by a wealthy family and an individual who brought Bauhaus and artists and architecture to Colorado for himself and his partners and their community."

"They made a lot of strong statements early on with architecture and design and philosophy. That has now led to the birth of the Aspen Institute and Aspen Ideas Festival. Looking at Aspen decades later, it is one of the most iconic mountain towns in America that attracts a global audience."

While Zhang and the team do not want Powder Mountain to become Aspen in any way, shape, or form, they want to create a space without the glamor and celebrity influence where artists, "through creating work, living on the mountain, bring their creativity and their soul to this place, and can almost create the more rustic, artistic, artisanal experience to the mountains."

The open-air art museum is perhaps the crux of this idea. Zhang admitted he hasn't seen a concept like this yet. "We haven't seen art integrated into the actual skiing experience in a way that isn't meant to take you away from it."

In Zhang's words, skiers won't be "dodging sculptures," but will be introduced to a new level of experience catered to both skiers and art connoisseurs alike. "Powder Mountain is one of the largest skiable areas in the U.S., and we can sensitively and thoughtfully incorporate art throughout the terrain that may, over ten years, attract the right tourist who wants to ski, who wants to interact with art in a new novel, thoughtful, elevated way."

Zhang envisions the open-air museum functioning by the mountain's terrain serving as the museum, and the art serving as, well, the art. For example, "Powder Mountain has tons of aspen groves and areas where the skiing is similar to backcountry."

"We would site these works in forest groves where people ski to, but it's not necessarily a frequented run. We want to integrate the work into the landscape or into the infrastructure so that it blends in and makes you do a double take."

"A great example is one of the first works that were we've commissioned by EJ Hill that's being installed right now. We're putting two new lifts in this summer as we speak, Lightning Ridge and Timberline. We invited EJ Hill, who has a whole category of art he calls amusement aesthetics."

"He manipulates roller coasters. He plays with ferris wheels. He really thinks about how we can re-contextualize these traditional amusement rides. He once said, 'on a ski lift, you're thinking it's just getting you from point a to point b. There's really not much thought that goes into that sort of lift experience.'"

"But for anyone who skis, that's eight minutes of your ride you're doing multiple times a day. EJ Hill asked, 'how can we make that lift feel sculptural?'"

"We put him in contact with Skytrack, the main manufacturer of the lifts, and we all started to work together on selecting the colors and understanding what constraints we had, safety, you know, all these different things."

"What we landed on is these two lifts that are different colors that folks will literally ride on to take to reach the tops of peaks. They will function like a sculpture. Besides the colors, we're looking at vintage carousel horses that get integrated into the terminals in different areas. It will almost look like a sculpture in and of itself."

While this sounds creative and exciting, one question skiers may have is: how will this affect lift prices? Zhang was quick to assure POWDER that all of the money funding the art museum is coming out of a nonprofit. "We thought that was very important. If there's one thing we wanted to make really clear, it's this idea that, you know, we don't want people thinking, 'are my lift or my lift tickets going up because it's funding all this art?'"

"They're totally separate entities. The art is done by a nonprofit foundation that Reed's family is philanthropically contributing to. It's separate from the resort operations and mountain operations."

Even for the hardest-core powder hounds, it is hard to argue with that.

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