72 Hours of Art in Salt Lake City: Museum Hopping, Spiral Jetty and Sculpture on the Slopes

Usually, when I do this column I have a passing familiarity with the city I’m visiting, but I arrive in Salt Lake City knowing almost nothing about it. Of course, what I’m really here to see is not exactly in Salt Lake City but near it. If the name Powder Mountain is passingly familiar, that’s probably because of its association with another name: Reed Hastings. After leaving Netflix in 2023, the billionaire acquired a stake in the five-decades-old ski resort—one of America’s largest, with 8,000 skiable acres outside Eden, Utah. A second Reed—Reed Hilderbrand, the landscape architect behind Storm King Art Center—helped Hastings shape Powder Mountain into something that might be wholly unique: a skiable outdoor art museum, with installations by Nancy Holt, Nobuo Sekine, Madeline Hollander, EJ Hill, Kayode Ojo, Davina Semo, Susan Philipsz and Gerard & Kelly among others, plus a major James Turrell installation and further expansions planned.

Even better, Powder Mountain sits a few hundred miles from some of the most consequential large-scale land art ever made—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which I’m visiting, and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976), which is too far a drive for a packed long weekend. But Salt Lake City itself turns out to be worth the time I dedicated to checking it out. Its art scene is smaller by far than those in coastal markets but surprisingly layered—a mix of regional identity, robust civic support and a growing experimental community. It’s often described as one of the more interesting “under-the-radar” art ecosystems in the American West, and after a full day experiencing just some of what SLC offers, I’m inclined to agree with that assesment.

Fair warning that you won’t find much about lodging below because I stayed in a house in Powder Mountain’s private 650-lot residential community, Powder Haven. (Buying a home there buys you ski-in, ski-out access to some exclusive areas of the mountain.) But the closest hotels and Airbnbs are about 25 easy minutes away, and I toured one, just to get an idea of what’s around. The 15-room Compass Rose Lodge in nearby Huntsville is owned by Bonnie and Jeff Hyde, whose uncle, Dean Perkins, skied for the first U.S. Olympic ski team, and it shows in the walls, shelves and corners decorated with 10th Mountain Division artifacts, antique skis and gear and Olympic pics and paraphernalia. The hotel, which is down the street from the oldest continuously operating bar in Utah, the must-visit Shooting Star Saloon, feels new—it opened in January of 2020, just before the pandemic shut the world down, and it managed to stay afloat partly by hosting a string of Hallmark and Lifetime productions, including Check Inn to Christmas and A Cozy Christmas Inn.

The latter film’s storyline focuses on the hotel’s most distinctive feature: a rooftop observatory that is the conceptual anchor around which the entire property was apparently designed. The Huntsville Astronomic and Lunar Observatory, or HALO, is home to a 16-inch-aperture Ritchey-Chrétien telescope—the centerpiece of nightly “skywalks,” school programs and the occasional marriage proposal. Scott, a lifelong Huntsville resident and self-described child of the Space Race, guides the programming. “We do tours for up to 20 people, have kids’ classes and we even did one wedding up here,” he tells me. “We’ve had four or five engagement proposals. And people bring their stars they’ve had named—which, by the way, isn’t real.” All those stars already have names, he adds. (It was the middle of the afternoon when I dropped by, so the only star I saw was the sun, which I photographed through the observatory’s solar filter.)

And now, on to the art.

Day 1

I’ve been up since 3:30, and while Salt Lake City International Airport has been building an art collection since 1977, I clock almost none of it as I stumble my way to my baggage carousel. (Napa-based artist Gordon Huether seems to have a monopoly on the place, but his benches are so functional they don’t read as aesthetic, and his wall works are so decorative they don’t read as art.) Nearby is another, vertical carousel dedicated entirely to skis, which I have never seen before and which kicks my curiosity and my anxiety into high gear. For ease of packing, I brought my old Snow Blades, which should tell you approximately how old I am—please don’t do the math—and I feel faintly ridiculous standing there with my tiny duffel while everyone around me wrestles with brand new ski bags that probably cost more than my first car. Speaking of cars, my next stop is the rental counter. I initially reserved a sedan, but according to Utahns on Reddit, the road up to Powder Mountain has the second steepest grade of any in the U.S. It’s March, so the roads are probably clear, but I upgrade to a Jeep just in case.

It’s a 20-minute drive in my white Wrangler—the de rigueur mountain rental— to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, where I meet briefly with executive director Gretchen Dietrich and learn that the UMFA has a collection of some 22,000 objects spanning ancient to contemporary, with strong holdings in Japanese, South Asian, African, South and Central American and Pacific art—more or less what I’d expect from a smaller-scale urban fine arts museum. What stands out, though, is the recent reinstall of the South and Central American collection, curated in partnership with the community. The placards are unusually good, the result of curators, educators and community members working together; across the board, the museum puts the work in conversation with ancient art and modern perspectives. “Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt“ is the highlight of my visit, and the lithographs are the highlight of the show, particularly those from the Tamarind Institute and the works in the Companion Species.

I know some people hate the question, but I can’t help myself, and I ask Dietrich to sum up Salt Lake City’s arts ecosystem in just a few words. “It’s a small scene, but it’s wonderful,” she says, adding presciently that the folks at Powder Art Foundation have been very good about integrating with and supporting the local arts community.

My next stop could have been ONE Modern Art, but it’s open by appointment only. Salt Lake Art Museum (a new museum dedicated to Utahn artists) was also on my radar, but it won’t open until July. More of what I didn’t see but considered: Phillips Gallery, Modern West Fine Art, A Gallery / Allen+Alan Fine Art and Urban Arts Gallery, which is tied to the Utah Arts Alliance and supports emerging and alternative artists. Many of the art spaces in Salt Lake City blur the line between commercial gallery, studio and community hub, which is typical of smaller art markets.

On that note, I’m going to check out Finch Lane Gallery, a community art space that has been running continuously since 1933. It’s tucked behind a hedge in a nondescript building in a public park, and it takes me a few loops to figure out where the entrance to the parking lot is. I’m the only one in the gallery—it’s mid-day on a weekday—when Todd Oberndorfer, the Visual Arts Program Coordinator for the Salt Lake City Arts Council, bounds down the stairs to greet me. He’s one of those people who are genuinely enthusiastic about what they do, and so I don’t actually have to ask him about Salt Lake City’s art scene because he describes, unprompted, Salt Lake City’s artists as unusually proactive and socially engaged, using words like ‘passionate,’ ‘connected’ and ‘amazing.’

On during my visit are Jill Saxton Smith’s “(un)contained: On Skin, Boundaries, and the Emotions We Hold,” with eerily taxidermic works made from bioplastics, hair, botanicals and feathers, and Benjamin Childress’s “Shadows and Alleyways,” which showcases his colorful yet ghostly afterimages of a suburbia both familiar and strange. Finch Lane runs about six exhibitions a year, all with work by Utahns or artists with Utah connections, emerging to established, and while all the work is for sale, it’s not a commercial gallery—something Oberndorfer tells me takes the pressure off. He doesn’t have to sell everything, he says, but he certainly tries.

The drive to the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art is short, and I know I’m close when the Salt Lake Temple looms over the road, vast and improbable against the blue sky. It’s such a perfect day that I take a little wander, popping into the Salt Lake Tabernacle to gape at its colossal pipe organ and then drifting through the neighborhood in search of public art. (I find works by modernist sculptor and photographer Ursula Brodauf-Craig, sculptor Dave Eddy and mixed-media artist Aaron T. Stephan in close proximity.) If I had more time, SLC has a self-guided art walk and a transit art crawl—and once monthly, the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll— but my allotted hours for exploring the city’s art are dwindling fast.

UMOCA, founded in 1931, is the city’s primary contemporary art institution, and the modest suggested $10 donation gets you into six galleries worth of work by local, national and international artists. It’s small, even by regional contemporary art museum standards, but punches above its weight class, in part thanks to the main gallery’s movable walls, which let curators use the space creatively. Sky Hopinka’s Lore was quietly devastating and a particular highlight of my visit. In this video work transparencies of people and landscapes are layered and repositioned on a light table as the artist narrates a lengthy poem. On the same floor as Sara Serratos’s “Paisana”—a multimedia examination of how governmental and labor systems regulate and extract from migrant bodies—it made for a heavy start. I try to see everything before heading down to “Altered States in the Acid West” in the main gallery, which, to be honest, doesn’t sound like my thing. (I’ve never been the biggest fan of Western art and know almost nothing about the acid Western genre.) But this wonderfully curated group exhibition is definitely worth catching. Gilmore Scott’s The Bears Ears Storm Dazzlers stops me, and so does Margaret R. Thompson’s Venidero, but it’s Shelby Shadwell’s Visceral 8—a charcoal and pastel depiction of a recently shot mule deer wrapped in black plastic—that I think about for hours afterward.

I should really be heading up the mountain at this point, but I have to check out the Mormon Church History Museum when I see they have two art exhibitions on. I skip the church history and make a beeline for “From Above,” a show of modern Australian Aboriginal paintings presented with an LDS twist. In the next gallery, the exhibition of selections from several years’ worth of the church’s International Art Competitions—running since 1987 and now in its 13th iteration—has its high and low points, but showcases some legitimate talent.

Alas, I have to hit the road. Powder Mountain, with its art, awaits.

Day 2

I wake up with the sun in my own private ski lodge, which is a sentence I don’t mind typing out. From bed, I can see one of the Powder Mountain lifts—one of the resident-only lifts, I think, of which there are just a handful. It’s my understanding that the public areas of the mountain have stayed public, and real estate sales and membership costs on the smaller private side contribute to the running of the public resort. Lift ticket prices vary but are comparable to what I’m used to skiing the east, with its relatively dinky hills. To my eastie eyes, the Powder Mountain trail map is unsettlingly large.

Breakfast is at Skylodge, which is also resident-only, though you can enjoy the same sweeping view of the surrounding mountains from Hidden Lake Lodge next door. The drive up is, frankly, terrifying. I’m not a fan of heights, and aside from being in a plane, this might just be the highest up I’ve ever been. Which brings me to the topic of skiing and relative skill levels. I’m a confident skier… on the East Coast and those aforementioned dinky hills. Here, I can already tell that the runs are going to stay steeper longer, and I do end up having to give myself several pep talks to get through select spots on our tour with Alex Magnuson, Powder Art Foundation’s executive director. Who, I should add, only really started skiing when she took the job not too long ago and now shoots down slopes I find genuinely frightening like it’s no big deal.

Slowly and with some fits and starts, I’m able to get to all the artwork on the tour. Nobuo Sekine’s Phase of Nothingness—Stone Stack (1970/2025) is the work I’d been most keen to see. “Like all the artwork on the mountain, we designed it so people can’t ski into it,” Magnuson tells us as we carefully navigate the cracked and crunchy depressions around it. “By the time you get up onto that hill, you don’t have any momentum left; even if you bomb it, you’d just go boop.” That same level of problem-solving is baked into the placement of every piece of art at Powder Mountain, she adds. Each has been sited and engineered with a first-do-no-harm logic, with approach angles calculated, powder accumulation factored in and, in some cases, the surrounding terrain partially reconstructed. (Year-round accessibility is another factor; while there’s no programming off-season, art lovers are welcome to hike or bike to the installations for free.)

Next up is Kayode Ojo’s …and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house… (2025), made up of 21 crystal chandeliers hung across the pines. It’s a little underwhelming on this cloudy day, though Magnuson says that in full sun they sparkle radiantly. Sam Falls’s Geological Time (Healing Tree) (2026) works better in flat light, with its 2,000 linear feet of naturally occurring crystal beads strung through the branches of a tree just off a trail. It was originally slated for a spot directly adjacent to the lift we view it from, in conversation with the resort’s Mardi Gras trees, but the foundation worried the proximity would invite people to add to it.

The easiest work to see is EJ Hill’s Love Song (for Eden) (2025), installed on the Timberline Lift. (I think every ski lift at every mountain should have art on it.) Davina Semo’s Listener (2020-2024) takes more effort to engage with: several bells are hidden around the mountain in places that reward going off the beaten path. I ring the most accessible one.

After a Skylodge lunch of salmon with arugula and herb salad, the group disbands for free ski. The wind has picked up, and visibility is low but everyone else on the mountain is all smiles, so it’s off to the greens and chiller blues for me. I slowly curve my way down nearly-empty groomed runs, marveling at the criss-crossing tracks on every open foot of snow; guests are welcome to ski wherever their ability or bravery or some combination of the two take them. And I make a point of chatting with everyone with whom I share a lift. Some are local, most aren’t, but all are thrilled to be here.

Dinner tonight was meant to be a group affair, but one by one the members of said group are felled by various catastrophes mostly unrelated to the mountain and its hazards. Apres ski, I soak in my home base’s massive hot tub, watching skiers in the distance while snow drifts down around me. It’s still windy—too windy for Nancy Holt’s Starfire (1986) activation—but I bravely drive my Jeep back up to Skylodge for dinner and a cocktail and to watch the sun go down over the mountains.

Day 3

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a little under two hours west of Powder Mountain. The Skylodge chef packs the group a lunch, and our driver takes us out of the suburbs and into a landscape where farms with grazing horses give way to herds of cattle dotting vast open fields of scrub and flats of standing water that catch the light. And then, after a pit stop at Golden Spike National Historical Park (where I see the bathroom, not the spike), the land’s muted green transitions to an even drier, even rockier Martian brown. The now-dirt road washes out into the kind of packed-earth corrugation that vibrates your whole body, a feeling familiar to anyone who’s ever driven somewhere genuinely off the beaten path.

I find myself thinking about what it must have been like to encounter this landscape for the first time after spending most of a lifetime somewhere vastly different. Smithson described the water as being the color of wine, or sometimes “so bloody a hue as to bring to mind a geography of unspeakable carnage,” and as the dirt road carries us closer, a little bit of that begins to materialize in the form of a shimmering ribbon on the seemingly distant playa. But then, just past the remnants of some abandoned not-so-spiral jetty, there it all is: the vast lake, the rocky hills and the land art.

Dia Art Foundation says Spiral Jetty is there to engage with rather than simply to look at, and with the water level being what it is, that means walking the whole of it. It’s an exercise in mindfulness, whether you came to meditate or not, because the sand is soft enough and the basalt boulders are uneven enough to demand your full attention. Even so, I trip more than once while walking, distracted by the thought that Smithson built this in a week, while it will likely take me several to write the piece you’re reading now.

We picnic and then walk to the edge of Great Salt Lake, which is closer than it appears from Spiral Jetty and just as salty as you’d expect, with crystals scaling everything—sticks, stones, bones—that stays in one place for too long. Over the several hours we’re there, as the sun shifts and the entire landscape transforms around us. In an unsettling optical illusion, the faraway mountains hover over the water, which is pinkish up close but shines white-blue in the distance.

Back on the mountain that afternoon, the sun is out, the sky is clear and the temperature is positively balmy. There’s near-perfect visibility, and I finally see Griffin Loop’s Launch Intention (2014) from the road. I don my silly short skis for another few runs; at the top of the Lightning Ridge lift, EJ Hill’s Surrendered (Total Ascent) (2025) waves in the gentle breeze, a herald of the moment, as Hill puts it, “where the anticipation built on the journey upward becomes relinquished to gravity and the thrill of descent.” On my final run of the trip, relinquishing myself to gravity, I make my way back toward Ojo’s chandeliers, which are finally catching the light exactly as they should.

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