‘A tremendous opportunity’: Utah’s unique skiable outdoor art museum

The largest ski resort in the United States is set to transform itself into one of the biggest land art investments in years – or possibly ever. In the works since 2019, Utah's Powder Mountain, located about a 90-minute drive from Salt Lake City, is re-envisioning itself as a year-round destination for those who love art as much as they enjoy donning a pair of skis, hiking boots or climbing gloves. The park will soft-launch later this year with a group of inaugural pieces, with a full launch slated for 2026.

Utah is a logical location, as the land art movement is largely associated with the American south-west. Seen primarily as an Anglo-American artistic invention, some of the movement's most recognized pieces – including Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, City, Roden Crater and The Lightning Field – all reside in the south-west. The area also has a much longer history of Indigenous communities intervening in the land in various ways, including in petroglyphs, which are found throughout the region.

Veteran art curator Matthew Thompson, who has been tapped to direct Powder Mountain's arts plan, has sky-high hopes for the park's potential. "We want this to be an experience that will be impossible to do in a single day," he told me.

Part of Thompson's vision is to deeply embed the artwork into the land, rather than to form an exhibition more in the mold of a traditional sculpture garden. Thompson wants Powder Mountain to become a destination that works in dialogue with the natural world that encloses it, transforming with the changes in weather and season. "This is such a tremendous opportunity to really think about commissioning work in dialogue with seasonal rhythms," he said. "I want to think about that different sense of time that you get up in the mountains, when you're really thinking about geological time."

Thompson has been thoughtful in how Powder Mountain works in congruence with the land, carefully planning routes that visitors will take to see the art – a challenging task on a site that can change radically with the season. "A slope of 13% or so is an easy thing on skis," he said. "But for a hiker, 13% is not at all a beginner hike. We're creating a series of loops that work equally well in the summer and winter." He also added that, depending on the artist's vision, some pieces may be remote and difficult to get to, and that the park plans to have things to offer everyone regardless of ability and mobility levels.

Among those offering creations for the park's grand opening is the renowned public artist Nancy Holt – her land art masterpiece Sun Tunnels sits on the opposite side of the Great Salt Lake from Powder Mountain, near Utah's border with Nevada. Another piece for the inaugural lineup will be created by the artist Paul McCarthy; known for his distinctive and often controversial "inflatable sculptures", he will draw on the larger mythology of the American west to help integrate Powder Mountain into the sizable history that it hopes to become a major part of.

Powder Mountain will also have a piece from James Turrell, whose vast Roden Crater – made from an extinct volcano – is almost certainly the largest single land art project ever attempted. The artist's sizable "light space", Apani, which received a rave reception when it was originally shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale, will be installed at Powder Mountain as one of the site's first permanent acquisitions.

Beyond simply building an enormous home for public art and sculpture, Powder Mountain also hopes to shake up the very white, cis-het world of land art. As the art critic Megan O'Grady wrote of the movement in 2018, it is often critiqued as "an almost perfect distillation of the art world's history of male privilege ... It is one of the contemporary art movements most urgently in need of reconsideration."

Hoping to ameliorate this lack of diversity, Thompson shared his determination to include more female artists, artists of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community on Powder Mountain, as well as to consider diversity from a broad array of perspectives. "It's incumbent on us to think about artists from different class backgrounds and different geographies," he said. As part of a broad approach to diversity, Thompson also wants Powder Mountain to help envision new vocabularies for land art and to expand ideas of who counts as a land artist.

Contributing to those attempts at diversity, Powder Mountain has already placed its very first piece of art, created by the art duo Gerard & Kelly, whose work often examines queer themes and histories. Their sculpture, Relay, is a functional ski magic carpet that doubles as a calling card for queerness. Visitors can ascend 90 feet up the Sun Tunnel ski slope by riding on Relay's conveyor belt, along the way taking in the rainbow bands of color that have been installed by Gerard & Kelly on to the magic carpet's canopy.

According to Brennan Gerard, Relay is in part about letting go of your anxieties and orienting to the present. He hopes that it will calm jittery nerves, particularly of younger skiers, and help bring all visitors back to their beginner's mind. "Maybe you might have some anxiety about skiing," he postulated. "Relay calls on you to be present in that moment, to see the landscape and the light, to notice these small details, maybe as a way of overcoming that fear. It's about celebrating how that moment that's full of risk is going to make us more present."

During the night-time, Relay transforms, lighting up into what is essentially a giant rainbow deep in rural Utah. Gerard & Kelly found this aspect of their creation poignant, and relished the idea of their rainbow residing so close to Salt Lake City. They also liked that Relay functions as a sort of welcome to the mountain. "There's something to Relay about bringing a message of inclusivity of this particular part of the mountain," said Ryan Kelly. "It's the first part of the trails, the most densely populated part of the park. It telegraphs a message of diversity and inclusivity."

Thompson has long-term ambitions for Powder Mountain, wanting it to be an opportunity to really think about public art in new ways, particularly alongside the notions of exertion and endurance that come from physical activity. "I'm really interested in the different kinds of mental and perceptual bodily states that you enter into when you're particularly active," he told me. "How your focus narrows, your sense of time flows – I'm excited to see how that impacts someone's art-viewing experience."

He also hopes to share the sense of grandiosity and wonder that can come uniquely from land art. As someone who has enjoyed nature for his whole life, and who has worked to integrate the environment into his career in art, he wants visitors to Powder Mountain to share that magical feeling with him. "The notion of working on something for your entire life, that sense of expanse really speaks to me," Thompson said. "It's not just a bravado of scale but also thinking about all of the implications that come with that. It's so complicated, so expansive."