Inside a Utah Ski Resort's Swanky Upgrade
When this Netflix cofounder bought Powder Mountain, everything changed.
“My early exposure to counterculture existed in the [Ogden] mountains,” says beloved provocateur and artist Paul McCarthy of the rugged valley in Utah, a little over an hour away from the state’s capital, Salt Lake City. “I grew up right at the base of them, and spent a lot of time in them; I went to art school right at the bottom of that canyon,” adds McCarthy, whose practice is best known for his risqué public interventions, such as the infamous Tree in Place Vendôme or the immersive WS White Snow.
McCarthy has lived in Los Angeles for half a century and is associated with a striking polemical force found more at home in big cities than in the humbling nature of the mountains, until now. Chatter around the apres-ski set lately has carried word of a new sculpture park, one that rivals the global greats—Naoshima, Storm King, La Coste, Inhotim—embedded within a luxury ski resort. But mere gossip Powder Mountain is not. It’s news. Powder Mountain has been a public ski mountain since 1972, and now touts over 12,000 acres used for not only skiing but also hiking, biking, and other alpine adventures.
In 2023, Netflix cofounder and former CEO Reed Hastings acquired the mountain, with a renewed vision of an ideal 21st-century mountain resort, which included the decision to split the mountain into public and private sections. Ski resorts have always been a fixed point on the jet-set calendar. Still, this preferred pastime isn’t as secure in its traditional place in these times. “Powder has been struggling financially, so I stepped in a few months ago to invest and find a sustainable path for staying uncrowded and independent,” Hastings wrote in a public statement, hinting at the forthcoming luxury makeover. “In order to pay our bills, we need to sell more real estate, and to do that we are introducing private homeowner-only skiing a year from now.”
Luxury homes that begin at $2 million now line the slopes in the private Powder Haven, which also functions as a membership club where fees range between $30,000 and $100,000 per year. Fuss has been made over this exclusivity, but the public side is where the action is, and not just for the Black Diamonds. Powder Mountain is offering something rather novel for a ski environment: public programming. Their biggest effort? An open-air public museum and sculpture park that spans all 12,000 acres of the terrain.
"How do we capture that wildness and think about a marriage of artist and site that really connects you to the environment in a powerful way?"
Interestingly, an art park wasn't in the original sketch that Hastings had for the resort. But Chief Creative Officer Alex Zhang and roving public art curator Matthew Thompson had other plans. “Matthew and I actually spent time at one of the Powder events and started really talking about this idea,” Zhang says. Zhang had been visiting Powder Mountain for about eight years. “I just really fell in love. I learned to ski there,” he says. He got in touch with Hastings to pitch him on the idea. Such fate unfolded in 2022 (Hastings bought a minority stake in the resort in April 2023 and became majority owner in Sept 2023), and when the time came, Zhang and Thompson were well prepared from years of thinking it through. Hastings instantly bit.
“How do we capture that wildness and think about a marriage of artist and site that really connects you to the environment in a powerful way?” Thompson says. That arrived through the selection of artists to take the experience into the adventurous, including McCarthy. Artists like James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Arthur Jafa, and Davina Semo are both commissioned and acquired, and the nonprofit organization Powder Art Foundation was establishes to build and steward the project. The curators emphasize that funding comes from private sources, not the mountain itself (private or public sector).
Powder Art Foundation is overseen by Zhang and Thompson; they brought in independent curator Diana Nawi to build out a 5-, 10-, 25-, and 50-year vision with the full trust and support of Hastings. “We were proposing all of these pretty boundary-pushing things, in terms of the environment and the experience,” Thompson says. “And Reed’s first point of challenge was, is this daring enough?”
Susan Phillips’s We’ll All Go Together, a haunting and sumptuous “unproduced, unaccompanied voice and singing” that “literally stops you in your tracks,” tackles the subjects of life, death, and everything in between, Zhang says. Zhang recalls after the work’s install, “We were having dinner and Reed looks at Matthew, and he's like, ‘let's go bolder.’”
"It was so important to us to look at the very unique infrastructure of the ski resort as precisely an opportunity to integrate art and artist."
Thompson is attuned to the mythic lore of the American West, as well as the region’s natural bounty, from overseeing “Art on the Mountain” at the Aspen Art Museum and holding curatorial positions at LACMA. Unique to Utah is its fertile legacy of land art—beginning with the ancient petroglyphs in the Wasatch and Uinta mountain ranges to the sites of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. No surprise, then, that Powder Mountain has acquired a significant ‘80s-era work from Holt. Holt’s work is most known for artwork, sculpture, and installations that integrate into land. “That's why it was so important to us to look at the very unique infrastructure of the ski resort as precisely an opportunity to integrate art and artists,” Thompson says. Quite literally. As Zhang explains, “We are putting in four new ski lifts this summer, as we speak, so we approached E.J. Hill, who has a background in amusement aesthetics, to manipulate two of those ski lifts into an actual sculpture.”
To realize the grounds, they called in Reed Hilderbrand, the powerhouse firm behind Storm King and Crystal Bridges, to find out if the principles of land conservation and ecology could shape the experience. “Every time we are invited to make something new, we jump into trying to understand what relationships could start to resonate between the land, the community, and the art,” principal Beka Sturges says. The approach? “As an upside-down ski resort, where you eat, live, and arrive at the top of the mountain. We thought it would make sense to organize the sculpture park along the canyon, and bring you down into the mountain and close to the works of art.”
This approach allowed artists to find their own spaces for their work, particularly McCarthy. “I was interested in going to the very edge of the resort, in a way ‘out of bounds,’ so that in order to get to it, you had to walk, make a journey of it,” he says. “There is a kind of coming back, but I don't know how critical it is. I was more interested in making a set on a mountain top.”
