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

SLC's art scene is smaller than those in coastal markets but surprisingly layered, and not too far out of the city, you'll find world-class sculpture paired with world-class skiing and some of the most consequential earthworks ever made.

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.

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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.

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........

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