Aspen Resort Taps Takashi Murakami to Design its Lift Tickets

We love to find art in unexpected places—look up as you walk past Manhattan's New Museum on Bowery Street, and there is a Chris Burden, seemingly suspended in the air. Cross Chicago’s Millennium Park and you won’t miss the silver, seductive bean that sits solidly on the ground, otherwise known as Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor. Occasionally, however, it’s the smaller details that count.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of an ongoing collaboration between the Aspen Resort and Aspen Art Museum, who have both pledged to create art in a particularly unusual space: the resort’s lift tickets. In previous years, contemporary artists like Jim Hodges, Karen Kilimnik, and David Shrigley have designed lift tickets (those stickers you lanyard onto your Gortex jacket) for the program, but for the big 10th anniversary, the resort tapped Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. He's known for incorporating the popular drama and flat forms of Japanese manga and cartoons into his pieces, so it's no surprise that his iteration of a lift ticket is kaleidoscopic and cute, a chaotic mix of 1960s patterning and contemporary Japanese animations.

Onward for a look at the lift tickets through the years.