Polar bear artwork to grace Aspen Skiing’s lift tickets
Artist Paola Pivi’s polar-bearfocused artwork will grace the Aspen Skiing Co.’s 2021-22 lift tickets, the company announced this month.
Pivi’s creations are made up of two installations, Untitled, which entails four large-scale sculptures of polar bears, and her installation called We are the baby gang, featuring six smaller-scale bears. Along with six lift ticket designs, Skico will also feature Pivi’s art installations in Aspen at the Sundeck and in its private mountaintop members club as well as in Snowmass at the Elk Camp restaurant.
The partnership marks the 17th year of contemporary artists lending or creating work for Aspen’s passes. The program, long part of the Aspen Art Museum’s “Art in Unexpected Places” initiative, has been rebranded “ARTUP” by the Skico for this season. The Skico-museum partnership ran from 2005 to 2017, after which artists have been chosen internally with direction from artist Paula Crown, whose family owns the company and whose work was featured on passes for the 2017-18 season.
To create the lift ticket art and the on-mountain installations, Pivi worked with a taxidermist to design bears, which are covered in multi-colored feathers, in charming and uncannily humanlike positions, according the announcement. Pivi’s inspiration for the lift ticket art and in-resort installations draws upon the call to action to break down division and separation between humanity and nature, according to the announcement.
“Introducing the whimsical and thought-provoking art of Paola Pivi to the slopes of Aspen Snowmass is timely,” Paula Crown said in the announcement. “Art’s superpower is its ability to connect
and heal. Paola Pivi’s work brings joy, as well as a new framework through which viewers understand our four-legged friends and our shared environment.”
Pivi’s Untitled and We are the baby gang designs and concepts also will be featured on limited collection Aspen Snowmass merchandise including apparel and accessories, to be sold at select Four Mountain Sports retail shops in downtown Aspen and at the base of each mountain.
The lift ticket program previously has featured commissioned works by internationally recognized artists such as Friendswithyou — which last season also made a light installation on gondola plaza — Susan Te Kahurangi King, Hank Willis Thomas, Yutaka Sone, Peter Doig, Karen Kilimnik, Jim Hodges, Carla Klein, Mamma Andersson, Mark Grotjahn, David Shrigley, Mark Bradford, Anne Collier, Takashi Murakami, Laura Owens and Crown.