Ever wanted to ski through an art museum? You can at this Utah resort.

Eden • If skiers and snowboarders already thought Powder Mountain was turning swanky, just wait until they see the chandeliers.

Twenty one of them sway in the wind on dainty chains strung 21 feet in the air between dark green bows of pine trees. The unexpected ballroom they create can be accessed by dropping into the trees near the bottom of an intermediate run named Dr. C. Those who like to take their art with a lower heart rate can peer out at the glimmering crystal crowns and bask in their rainbow refractions from East 40, a beginner run that serves as a service road in the offseason.

That’s right. The most talked-about chandeliers at Powder Mountain aren’t dangling inside one of the mansions in Powder Haven — the ultra-luxe, private enclave where owners pay upward of $25,000 a year in membership dues for exclusive access to four of the ski area’s 10 lifts. They are installations in the Powder Art Foundation’s new open-air museum, and they are open to the public.

“That’s really, really important to us,” said Alexandra Magnuson, executive director of the Powder Art Foundation. “We don’t put any art anywhere that isn’t public.”

It’s not unusual for ski areas to dot their slopes with art. Gremlin metal works roam Park City Mountain, for example, and Aspen Snowmass in Colorado occasionally showcases temporary installations. Yet it appears that few, if any, offer an entire, curated exhibition.

A skiable art experiment

Though he has brought many changes to Powder Mountain, this novel approach to art actually predates Reed Hastings, the Netflix cofounder who took majority control of the resort in 2023. Matthew Thompson, the Powder Art Foundation’s artistic director, said he was approached about the idea in 2019 by Alex Zhang. Now Powder Mountain’s chief creative officer, Zhang at the time held the same position with Summit, which ran a series of high-minded conferences. Its founders owned the resort prior to Hastings’ arrival and made it Summit’s headquarters.

Still, it took Hastings — and his money — to turn the idea into a reality. He bankrolled the Powder Art Foundation, yet now he has no official role within the organization. It is a nonprofit and is guided by a five-person board of directors that Zhang presides over.

Hastings told The New York Times that a visit to the Storm King Art Center — a 500-acre outdoor contemporary art museum in New York’s Hudson Valley — more than 20 years ago changed his idea of what art was. Magnuson said that, when the idea of bringing art to Powder Mountain was presented to him, she believes the billionaire was intrigued, as she was, by the prospect of establishing what may be the world’s first skiable art gallery.

“Your brain chemistry when going into MoMA is very different than your brain chemistry skiing,” she said. “We love that idea. We love what that connotes.

“What that means is, you don’t have to pay $10 for parking and go into a place where you can hear a pin drop. In those spaces, there’s a lot of nervousness around how one interacts with the art and how much you’re supposed to know. The artwork on the mountain speaks for itself.”

Once the foundation was established, the next step was selecting the art. Eleven pieces — ranging from huge metal sculptures to neon signs — now comprise the collection. Magnuson said the foundation plans to add between four and six installations a year for the next couple years, and then pause to take stock of the collection. Most will eventually be stops on a public, 9-mile hiking trail.

Artworks must have a special combination of characteristics to be chosen by the board, Magnuson said.

“In this landscape, there’s so many different things it has to do well,” she said. “It has to do well in the elements. It has to do well in multiple seasons with multiple pitches and different ground levels, and all of this complication. But also it has to work in the landscape. It has to work from different viewpoints.”

If choosing the pieces was hard, though, it was nothing compared to installing them.

An uphill challenge

On a knoll with a dramatic view of 9,000-foot Sharp Mountain peeking above a deep, cloud-shrouded valley sits what is likely one of the world’s largest cairns.

In “Phase of Nothingness - Stone Stack” by the late Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine, nine boulders teeter atop each other. They stretch 19 feet high and weigh an estimated 20 tons. The bottom two are the size of a grizzly bear, the top one closer to a lynx. And it bows slightly, as though it’s on the verge of toppling over.

“Stone Stack” captures the moment between stasis and action and is the anchor piece that the rest of the collection is built around, Magnuson said. As such, it is positioned on a marquee spot at the resort in terms of its view and its central location. It’s to the rider’s right of the Hidden Lake Express lift and just below the intersection of the Amy’s 3-mile beginner ski run and the White Pine intermediate run.

Yet, getting this artwork to this place might, in and of itself, be considered Thompson’s masterpiece.

Sekine died in 2019 having envisioned, but never realized, the massive cairn. So, it was up to Thompson and his team to create it in his spirit, which meant with as little human manipulation as possible.

Almost all of the stones were harvested from a quarry in California where granite boulders come out of the ground naturally rounded. Thompson said he was able to get within 5% of the size of the stones the artist had envisioned. They were then trucked up State Route 158 — the steepest highway in Utah — to the resort. After the stones were placed, they had to be joined together. And, finally, a berm had to be created to ensure skiers and snowboarders couldn’t accidentally slide into the artwork.

“We’ve built a really top-level team in terms of people with deep experience, working closely with artists and fabricating works and installing works and in fairly extreme environments,” he said. “And I’ll tell you that even with that experience, this environment is just a wholly different animal. A lot of things that we’re doing truly haven’t been done before.”

Thompson’s team had to get creative again to find a way to attach the chains of Kayode Ojo’s chandelier piece — officially titled “‘...and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house…’” — to the trees in a way that would cause no harm and be safe to ski under. The process included bringing in arborists as well as reinforcing some of the crystal with translucent wire.

“Trees are not static, so you have to account for the sway, the changes in tension, all of those things,” Thompson said. “There’s all sorts of hidden mechanisms at play to really keep the expression of the work quite simple and direct.”

Even Nancy Holt’s “Starfire” required some creative engineering due to being located on Powder Mountain. The 1986 piece by the Utah artist who also created “Sun Tunnels” in the Great Basin Desert appears, to the untrained eye, to be a series of fire pits. When they were placed, though, Thompson said the ground around them had to be built up to allow snowcats to pass over them.

In addition to those three works, the Powder Art Foundation this year added a neon sign on the bottom terminal of the Paradise lift and a white flag atop the Hidden Lake Express. Both are by 40-year-old EJ Hill. Those were added to a collection that already featured, among other works: a pair of bronze bells, a colored vinyl tunnel over a conveyor lift and the metalwork “Launch Intention” — better known as Paper Airplane — which found a home on the mountain in 2014.

All the piece ties together Utah’s legacy of land art, Thompson said, harkening back to works like the “Spiral Jetty” and “Sun Tunnels” and even to ancient Native American petroglyphs and pictographs.

“One of the things that we really wanted to do [was] really making a project that was a response to its site,” he said, “and not just, ‘Let’s just gather a bunch of artists that we think are cool, put a bunch of things here and see what happens.’”

The locations of the artworks are laid out on a ski map on the Powder Art Foundation website and in a brochure. They are not included in Powder Mountain’s standard trail map. That was an intentional choice, Magnuson said, to keep the art from being intrusive and to keep it wild.

“Our goal, which is a lofty one, is that we want people to be out in the wilderness and experience this thing and have that bring a sense of wonder and joy,” she said. “And most art just doesn’t have the opportunity to provide that context.”

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