When Reed Hastings purchased a $100 million majority ownership stake in Utah’s Powder Mountain, he expressed a desire to both improve the mountain for all its visitors and ensure the slopes maintained the level of seclusion that regular visitors knew and loved.
“This is an investment in what we consider to be the ultimate skier experience,” Hastings, the co-founder and former CEO of Netflix (NFLX), said in 2023. “We’re looking to accentuate what has always made it special. We’ll do that by making it more easily accessible, by bolstering infrastructure and amenities, and by maintaining the uncrowded feel Powder Mountain is known for.”
The construction of an outdoor art exhibition that will be integrated into the mountain’s skiing and hiking trails is one of the most prominent developments at Powder Mountain. Primarily funded by Hastings, the sculpture park will be incorporated throughout the mountain’s 8,464 acres.
“We want this to be an experience that will be impossible to do in a single day,” art curator Matthew Thompson told the Guardian in September.
“This is such a tremendous opportunity to really think about commissioning work in dialogue with seasonal rhythms,” he continued. “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.”
The sculpture park is expected to have a soft launch later this year before fully opening to guests in autumn 2025. The installation of art pieces is already happening — prominent artists such as Nancy Holt, Paul McCarthy, and James Turrell have all been tapped to contribute to the project.
The sculpture exhibition will be closed during the mountain’s summer mud season but will otherwise remain open for guests to view, while they’re also skiing and hiking.
“I’m really interested in the different kinds of mental and perceptual bodily states that you enter into when you’re particularly active,” Thompson told the Guardian. “How your focus narrows, your sense of time flows — I’m excited to see how that impacts someone’s art-viewing experience.”
While Powder Mountain’s exhibitions are still under construction, it is far from the first organization to incorporate art into the natural world.
Continue reading to learn more about five outdoor sculpture museums you can visit this fall.
