Billionaire Reed Hastings remembers visiting Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley a couple of decades ago.
“Walking around there got my curiosity going,” said Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, noting that his wife, Patty Quillin, grew up near the outdoor sculpture mecca. “It changed my perspective on what art is.”
Now, Hastings is announcing an ambitious outdoor art program at the ski resort he recently bought, Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah.
It began with the installation of two pieces: duo Gerard & Kelly’s “Relay (Powder Mountain)” and Susan Philipsz’s “We’ll All Go Together.” The next works will be installed this winter, with the full slate planned for a 2026 grand opening.
The artworks can be skied to or hiked to, and are open to the public. This winter’s debuts include commissioned pieces by EJ Hill, best known for his ridable indoor roller-coaster work at Mass MoCA, who will create art on the ski lifts, and Los Angeles sculptor Davina Semo, who is making three large-scale bells that produce different tones when rung.
The full program, still being set, will also include an extant work, James Turrell’s walk-in light installation “Ganzfeld Apani” (2011), which was featured at the Venice Biennale; a piece by land-art legend Nancy Holt (1938-2014), famous for her Utah work “Sun Tunnels”; and new commissions by sculptor and Utah native Paul McCarthy and text-based artist Jenny Holzer.
(Alex Goodlett | The New York Times) Reed Hastings, an avid skier and snowboarder, at Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah on March 11, 2024.
Hastings, an avid skier, gave credit to Powder Mountain’s chief creative officer, Alex Zhang, for driving the idea forward. Their inspirations include Desert X, an exhibition in the Coachella Valley of California, and the installations on the Japanese “art islands” of Naoshima and Teshima.
The Powder Mountain works will be owned by a nonprofit organization that is being set up by Hastings.
He noted that he is not a serious art collector in the rest of his life — at least not yet. “Alex is the visionary,” Hastings said, referring to Zhang, “and I’m the banker.”
To make the selections, they brought in Matthew Thompson, a former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who is now an independent curator and adviser.
“There’s a sexiness to saying ‘skiable sculpture park,’” Thompson said. He collaborated on the selections with Diana Nawi, who was recently hired as a contemporary curator at the Los Angeles museum.
The challenge is siting the works on the 12,000-acre property. “With most traditional sculpture parks, they’re an English garden notion of the picturesque — walk up, walk around and walk away,” Thompson said. “But this is an adventurous site with an outdoor adventure company.”
Thompson added, “All the works will connect you to the landscape. We’re not plopping them in a field.”
He cited Turrell’s “Ganzfeld Apani” as a “no-brainer first gesture,” given that the artist’s work is about perception, and will have broad views “looking out to the infinite.” It will be within walking distance from the main Powder Mountain parking lot. Turrell’s title refers to the Ganzfeld effect — the inability to perceive a uniform field, of which snow blindness is a prime example.
McCarthy, who lives in Los Angeles, grew up outside Salt Lake City. “Since I left in the ‘60s, I’ve never really made anything or done much there,” he said. “But I know that Utah affected me — you can’t get away from it. They’re in my sculptures, those cliff and mountain forms.”
McCarthy said his work would be sited somewhere “visually remote” and would take the form of an Alpine hut. He said he was considering wood, rock and stone as materials, and he was also toying with making a film there once the structure is complete.
Hill’s work will transform two Powder Mountain ski lifts, giving him another chance to explore art-in-motion, as he has done at Mass MoCA. That work addressed the way that amusement park attractions were once racially segregated.
In an email, Hill, who is Black, said his field could be described as “amusement aesthetics.”
Hill said that although the trip up, on the lift, is thought of as “more forgettable than the rest of the ride,” it is “arguably the most essential part.” He added that “lift engineers, designers and artists can use these moments to cultivate an even deeper sense of excitement for what’s to come.”
The ski-lift works will use reclaimed carousel horses and roller-coaster cars as a sculptural element on the lift system, Hill said. “Something to help elevate, quite literally, these bygone beings and vehicles. Give them a new life and renewed purpose.”
Skiing is a traditionally white sport, which may give Hill’s work another layer of meaning. In February, he went to Powder Mountain, where he skied for the first time, “when someone that I trust invited me,” he said, referring to Thompson.
Hill added that the experience made him think of Adrian Piper’s installation “Safe #1-4″ (1990). “I think that’s what we’re all after in large and small ways — to feel safe,” he said. “To be included. To be counted. To be regarded. To be seen.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.