After stepping down from the company last year, Netflix (NFLX) co-founder Reed Hastings invested $100,000 into Utah’s Powder Mountain, one of America’s largest ski resorts. Another Reed, Storm King Art Center landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand, will help transform the entire area into a cultural destination by creating a new skiable outdoor art museum. Independent curator Matthew Thompson will serve as director of Powder Mountain’s new art program, working alongside Powder Mountain’s chief creative officer Alex Zhang and curator Diana Nawi, who was appointed curator of contemporary art at LACMA last month. The museum will showcase both permanent acquisitions and site-specific commissions by major contemporary artists like James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Nancy Holt, Arthur Jafa and Paul McCarthy, as well as up-and-coming artists like EJ Hill, Gala Porras-Kim, Nikita Gale, Davina Semo and Raven Halfmoon.
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Highlights of the resort’s art program, which will be administered by the Powder Art Foundation, will include a mesmerizing walk-in light installation by James Turrell, Ganzfeld Apani (2011), which will be installed in a specially designed pavilion on the mountain between the trails and skyline. Also, in close conversation with the Powder Mountain’s nature, Jenny Holzer will create a series of engravings on the site’s stones, while a work of Nancy Holt’s land art from the 1980s will also be recreated on the mountain via a collaboration with the Smithson-Holt Foundation. Utah native artist Paul McCarthy, known for his provocative and often controversial works, has also conceived a site-specific immersive installation rooted in the mythology of the American West. Already on view are Griffin Loop’s Paper Airplane and Susan Phillipz’s We’ll All Go Together.
The new outdoor art museum at Powder Mountain, which will be free and open to the public in summer and fall and accessible with lift tickets in winter, will contribute to the already established contemporary art heritage of Utah. The mountain is located a few hundred miles from some of the world’s most impactful and iconic large-scale works of land art, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976), and the museum will continue this legacy of land art in the west, emphasizing possible relationships and integrations between art and nature as an exercise to inspire a more harmonious symbiosis between humans and the surrounding landscape. “The curatorial vision is rooted in the intentional integration of art into the landscape and the seasonal rhythms of the mountain, drawing deep connections to the legacy and enduring influence of the historical land art projects of the American West,” Nawi said in a statement. “We want to empower a diverse and intergenerational range of artists to create experiences in the landscape that broaden the story of land art and expand its possibilities.”
