This Ski-Resort-Turned-Sculpture-Park Carries the Spirit of Land Art into a New Era

Pioneering land artist Nancy Holt felt connected to the desert of the American West from her very first visit in 1968. A few years later, she discovered a stretch of “flat desert ringed by low mountains” in northwestern Utah, where she would create her best-known work, Sun Tunnels (1973–76): a quartet of 18-foot-long concrete cylinders positioned to capture the sunrise and sunset during the solstices. “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale,” Holt wrote in 1977.