Aspen Snowmass announced Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas as the 2018-19 winter season lift ticket artist. This will mark the 14th consecutive year that Aspen Snowmass has partnered with an acclaimed artist to design the lift ticket.

“Our lift ticket program is an important and natural extension of our founding vision, of Aspen being a place to renew the mind, the body and the spirit - the Aspen Idea,” says Mike Kaplan, president and CEO, Aspen Skiing Company. “Through art, we hope to encourage and inspire the self-examination that occurs while spending time in the mountains and in this unique community.  This will be the fourteenth season for this program and each year I am amazed by what the artist brings to the project. Hank Willis Thomas is pushing boundaries and it is an honor to have an artist of his caliber involved with the program.”

The six featured lift ticket designs are derived from Thomas’ series titled Fair Warning, which features text-based works from 1960-80 cigarette advertisements. By isolating these texts from the original advertisements, Thomas creates a dialogue around oftentimes gendered advertising ideals, including sexuality, style, and power.  Fair Warning reveals the hyper glamorized personas which target the consumer and highlight the way in which language can influence lifestyle.

Thomas recontextualizes the same text that was once used to try to sell the idea of polluting our air and our lungs, which now become words of encouragement as skiers conquer the mountain at high altitude. These slogans remind us that in this atmosphere, the oxygen that is available is vital and only our continued protection of the environment can make it possible.

"I am honored to be a part of Aspen Skiing Company’s lift ticket art program,” says Hank Willis Thomas. “As an artist whose work is focused on community, language, time and space, it is unfathomable to think about the vast number of people who will participate in this work by carrying on the conversation."

In previous years, Aspen Skiing Company has featured commissioned works by internationally recognized artists such as Paula Crown, Yutaka Sone, Peter Doig, Karen Kilimnik, Jim Hodges, Carla Klein, Mamma Andersson, Mark Grotjahn, David Shrigley, Mark Bradford, Anne Collier, Takashi Murakami, and Laura Owens. The lift ticket art program was started as a partnership between the Aspen Art Museum and Aspen Skiing Company in 2005.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Thomas is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

For more information about the Lift Ticket Art Program, please visit: https://www.aspensnowmass.com/we-are-different/art-in-unexpected-places/lift-ticket-artwork .