Powder Art Foundation Unveils Three New Sculptures for the 2026-2027 Ski Season
New works by Jenny Holzer, Rose Wylie, and Xu Zhen are among the 16 installations on display at the mountainside resort
With two of land art’s most iconic destinations—Nancy Holt’s wondrous Sun Tunnels (1973–76), four monumental concrete cylinders aligned with the desert sun, and Robert Smithson’s elemental Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1,500-foot coil of basalt and earth currently sitting on the exposed lakebed of the Great Salt Lake—Utah has long been a pilgrimage site for art lovers. Now there’s another reason to go: Powder Art Foundation.
The idea for Powder Art Foundation took shape after Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Powder Mountain chief creative officer Alex Zhang bonded over visits to Benesse Art Site on Naoshima, in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. “Within about two hours, we were like, ‘We got to do this,’ and he had the plan, and I had the capital,” Hastings recalled, after acquiring a majority stake in the then-struggling Powder Mountain ski resort in 2023. Situated on 8,000 acres in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, Powder Art Foundation, which has a partnership with Dia Art Foundation, draws on the legacy of Smithson and Holt by using the rugged alpine terrain as an exhibition space, inviting artists to create site-responsive works.
In 2024, the pair’s ambitious plan to launch the Powder Art Foundation was announced, and Davina Semo’s immersive Listener and Reflector bells were installed. In 2025, PAF unveiled works by Nancy Holt, Nobuo Sekine, EJ Hill, and Kayode Ojo. Now, PAF has 16 works on view, introducing pieces by Jenny Holzer, Rose Wylie, and Xu Zhen for the 2026-2027 ski season. Despite its location on a ski mountain, PAF is not a seasonal attraction: visitors can hike among the installations in warmer months, making the site accessible year-round.
At the top of the hill is British sculptor Rose Wylie’s Pale-Pink Pineapple/Bomb (2025), a towering bronze sculpture coated in pink paint and set against surrounding pines. Inspired by a pineapple she discovered at a Guyanese market, the work touches on colonization, globalization, and the decline of the British Empire.
A little farther down the hill is Holzer’s work, THE EYE (2026), an enormous 300-million-year-old quartzite boulder, carved with the phrase, “THE EYE ALSO A SUN WANDERS AND ALL THAT IT SEES IT OWNS.” The text was inspired by the late Logan, Utah, poet May Swenson. “This boulder was a very intense process for Jenny, of us trying to find something in situ. It was really important to her to find the right rock, and it was a really fun, really laborious process because we have a very large mountain,” recounted Jillian Brodie Rawson, director of production and operations at Powder Art Foundation.
Just along the trail is the third new sculpture for the 2026–2027 season: Xu’s brass-and-stainless-steel work Hello (2021-2022), a Corinthian column stretched, coiled, and transformed into the silhouette of a monumental snake. “It’s like a clash of cultures,” noted Brodie Rawson, as the Corinthian column and serpent fuse Western and Eastern visual traditions into a single form.
Those unable to make the three-hour drive to Holt’s Sun Tunnels can still see her art at PAF; Starfire, a 1986 land art sculpture, sits at the base of Powder Mountain’s Skylodge, made up of eight recessed fire pits arranged like the Big Dipper and the North Star. “She said that she wanted to bring the stars down to earth, and that’s literally what she’s doing,” said Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation. “But when we look at this work, it’s never the same. It’s always different.”
Not all of PAF’s holdings are currently on view. A 1980s Bruce Nauman awaits installation, as does a 2011 James Turrell that was initially exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale. Once installed, the work from his Ganzfeld series will be one of the few permanently accessible to the public.
Hastings hopes that PAF visitors will get “a sense of awe of both the wilderness—walking around on trails and trees on a mountain at 8,000 feet—and then how that interplays with the art. You don’t get to see monumental art on a mountain, and so it’s very perception-changing.”
For a state already synonymous with some of land art’s defining works, Powder Art Foundation adds a new kind of pilgrimage: one in which monumental contemporary art is encountered not across the desert, but while winding through an alpine landscape 8,000 feet above sea level.