Desert X is back for 2023.
There are so many reasons that the Palm Springs area is a must-visit right now—the weather is absolutely gorgeous, there are so many new restaurants, and it’s an epicenter for cultural moments, like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival in April and Desert X, which runs through May 7.
I recently got to visit Desert X (a first time for me!) and it was such an awe-inspiring experience. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s an art exhibition that takes place all over the Coachella Valley that’s open to the public and admission is free. The artists’ works are located in different locations throughout the area, so essentially, you can spend a whole day driving to the spots and taking in the art, all without spending a dime.
Like previous exhibitions, Desert X 2023 looks at social and environmental themes. And this year the focus is “on the changes that give form to a world increasingly shaped by climate crisis, globalism, and the political and economic migrations that follow in their wake.” Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-curator Diana Campbell, the works span sculpture, painting, writing, architecture, film, music, and more with 12 artists from Europe, North America, and South Asia participating. There is also an emotionally moving installation that honors Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man who died in January after a brutal beating by Memphis police officers. Photography was one of Nichols’s passions and six of his photographs are featured on billboards along North Gene Autry Trail, between Via Escuela and the I-10.
If you want to plan a visit, go to desertx.org to check out the map of the 2023 installations and for more information on how to experience the exhibition. Visiting hours are normally sunrise to sunset Sunday through Saturday (unless otherwise noted) and docents are at most sites every Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon.
Get a peek at the works and their official descriptions below.
“Responding to the ubiquity of the chain-link fence as a pattern spread across the Coachella Valley—a material that is meant to protect but also carries associations of violence—Rana Begum diffuses the material’s role as a divider through her manipulation of its form and color. We notice how light and air, sand and water, as well as people, can filter through her cloud-like pavilion, which offers paths of expansive escape rather than reductive confinement. Constantly changing with the movement of the sun and the visitors inside of it, the work emphasizes that nothing in life is static; everything, from the world outside to our emotions within, is in a continual state of flux.”
“Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio have created a poetic object that submerges visitors in the deep past and the distant future, taking inspiration from plants, which metabolize sunlight into energy, and the blue whale, the largest animal known to have lived on Earth. Fueling the potential for future life and visually transforming itself in the process, the work, which merges swimming pools in a landscape associated with tremendous water shortage, with water and fish-bone skeleton ‘sand’ from the Salton Sea, reminds us not only of the imperative for artists to create at the same level as society’s capacity to destroy, but also of our own connection to water and that the desert was once a sea. A lace-like steel sculpture of a to-scale blue whale heart is submerged in a pool pumped full of Salton-Sea water, but rather than stand as a harbinger of death, the sculpture metabolizes and creates energy and clean water that it deposits back into the atmosphere, fueling the potential for future life across the run of the exhibition and visually transforming itself in the process.”
“Gerald Clarke is an artist, university professor, cowboy, and Cahuilla tribal leader. He is known for deriving inspiration from his heritage and expressing traditional ideas in contemporary forms—mixed-media sculptures, paintings, works on paper, videos, performances, and installations—that are at once poetic and politically urgent. Clarke’s artistic output resonates with histories of assemblage, pop, and conceptual art produced by both Native and non-Native artists.
As an educator, Clarke understands the role that games can play in leading people to obtaining knowledge that they might have been hesitant to seek on their own. Employing the language of traditional Cahuilla basket weaving and American board games, the artist creates a monumental sculpture of a gameboard in the desert that immerses visitors in the natural and cultural history of Native Americans in the Coachella Valley. Catalyzing active learning, the maze-like structure invites visitors to walk on it and move according to instructions driving a game of cards, rewarding the player with new ways of viewing and understanding the landscape.”
“By employing drawing, sculpture, performance, writing, and multimedia installation, Paloma Contreras Lomas addresses topics such as patriarchy, violence, class segregation, colonial guilt, and constructed middle-class identity with a cinematic sense of humor. She exercises a playful sense of lightness to draw the viewer in to ponder heavy issues that are rarely addressed in Mexican society. Her work seeks to push back at the violent male gaze of the landscape by confronting its historical association with the male libido, the occupation and instrumentalization of territory, and economies of extraction.
Visitors encounter a dated car that has screeched to a halt in Sunnylands. An absurd array of tangled limbs of two mysterious characters wearing long hats sprawl out of the car and onto the site’s pristine, manicured grounds. Plush, long hands armed with soft-stuffed guns hang from the windows, barely camouflaged by the artificial overgrowth invading the sculpture. These strange characters accompany the visitor on a caricature of a western–meets–sci-fi audio-visual tour of the landscape, like a fictional tour of a seemingly familiar world outside, guided by aliens and ghosts.”
“With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Torkwase Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives. She seeks to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies, recognizing that many landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments were actively shaped to devalue Black life.
Liquid A Place is part of an ongoing series that started from the premise that we are the water in the room, inviting viewers to consider their bodily interconnection with rivers and oceans that surround us. After all, around 60 percent of our bodies and 70 percent of the planet is water, and these waters circulate across our bodies and the planet as they shift states from solid to liquid to gas.
For this iteration of Liquid A Place, Dyson creates a monumental sculpture that is a poetic meditation connecting the memory of water in the body and the memory of the water in the desert. How do we go to the water in our bodies to harvest memory? Can this liquid memory help us reconsider scale and distance as critical forms in holding onto liberatory life practices? What kind of scalable infrastructure can our bodies resist and invent, making cities more livable? How are new geographies formed from the architecture of our bodies?”
“The desert is a beautiful and attractive—yet also a dangerous and challenging—place. Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) carries a reflection on ‘cowboy culture’ that exists across both Mexican and American borders, representative of a macho, self-aggrandizing and forceful control of nature. These qualities also relate to the history of art, especially in the American West. In cowboy culture, and also in land art, there is an asserted promise to harness/control nature, which carries a pronounced risk of failure. In bull-riding, whether with a live animal or its mechanical avatar, competition with a wild beast carries an interest in and celebration of failure. The rider will fail and fall. A cowboy will become a clown. In his installation for Desert X, the artist replaced the bull component of the mechanical bull with a flat, geometric, reflective surface, slowing down the machine’s movement to reveal, little by little, what this object really is. Placed in the middle of the desert, in the formation of a herd, the work leads us to contemplate the ‘wild West,’ and our relationship to landscape and our role within it; our condition to be both attracted and replaced by failure.”
Hennessy Paradis partnered with García Torres during Desert X and hosted a special toast celebration, where I got a chance to chat with the artist. “The desert is such a difficult concept to grasp, an immense, easy to get lost place, both in reality and as a metaphor is so engaging and intriguing,” he says of the piece. “Trying to understand that, made me start the project. At some point in the process, I came across the cowboy, the fantasy of the cowboy, the cultural history of the cowboy, and his complicated relationship with nature. That’s where the mechanical bull came about, and that’s when it crossed into modern sculpture.”
And as for his inspiration, he was intrigued about the notions that are normally thought of as going against progress: “There are ideas that take us further than forward thinking. Sometimes it is good to slow down, to step back, to lose control, and even, as in a mechanical bull ride, to allow ourselves to fall. I believe in that.”
“Hylozoic/Desires [h/d] uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. For Desert X, they find this metaphor in salt. Inspired by the proliferation of conspiracies—UFOlogists, Scientologists, cybernetic spiritualists, Area 51, flat-earthers, lizard people, and chemtrails—h/d has created a wooden pillar that branches into loudspeakers that spew an imaginary conspiracy theory about Namak Nazar, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward. The particle appears to climb up and crystalize over the trunk of the pole, connecting the salt found in the stories from the loudspeaker to the physical desert landscape, where salt lines forecast droughts and floods to come and salt songs describe the sacred geometry of the desert before settler colonialism. Visitors are invited to join h/d in thinking through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love in their immersive audio-visual environment.”
“Sleeping Figure might be a cubist rendition of a classical odalisque, except here the cubes are shipping containers belonging to the globalized movement of goods and trade. Conceived at the time when a Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, German-managed, Panamanian-flagged and Indian-manned container behemoth found itself for six days under Egyptian jurisdiction while blocking the Suez Canal, Johnson’s figure speaks to the crumples and breaks of a supply chain economy in distress. Situated along the main artery connecting the Port of Los Angeles to the inland United States, the sculpture gains local relevance from the recently approved siting of distribution centers in the north of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs. Casual and laconic, it overlooks the landscape reminding us that the invisible hand of globalism now connected to its container body has come to rest in the Coachella Valley.”
“Born and raised in Sacramento California, Tyre Nichols’ photographs of landscapes, sunsets, monuments and the architectural vernaculars of his adopted town of Memphis, Tennessee are the unassuming documents of a young man whose eye was drawn to the moments of beauty and evanescence that shape the rituals of daily life. ‘My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens,’ he wrote. ‘I hope to one day let people see what I see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work.’
This work, now celebrated as part of Desert X, represents not just a vision that was brutally denied the opportunity to develop but the potential of all those individuals whose lives have been lost to the state sanctioned violence of institutional racism. Sited on billboards along Gene Autry Trail, Nichols’ work is also a reminder that so many of these needless deaths take place at the side of the road. Here the silent beauty of these levitated images stands in stark contrast with the terror experienced by Nichols and so many others on the shoulder below. But as with the vision the message is also one of hope: hope that with restrictions on pretextual stops California can lead the way in police reform; hope that together we can create a just society in which the fragile and beautiful talents of the likes of Tyre Nichols can flourish and grow.”
To support the Tyre Nichols Memorial Fund, visit here.
“Pioneer is a monument built in homage to the collective foremothers of contemporary America. Placed in the California desert, Pioneer exists as a figure that is simultaneously born out the historical event of America’s creation and one that has an ephemeral quality, untethered by any moment in time. The desert often references both the beginning and the end. Pioneer similarly represents the lost, expelled and forgotten Indigenous, Native and African women whose bodies and labor allowed for American expansion and growth, while also standing as a beacon of resilience for their descendants—a visual representation of their birthright and place within the American landscape. The sculpture celebrates flexibility of the divine feminine spirit and form and the fluidity of identity in contemporary America. It is a reminder that even in the desert, we are born from water. Placed within a palm oasis of the desert, Pioneer poses the question: Does it only rain on wet land?”
“Architect Marina Tabassum has established an aesthetic language that is contemporary to the world yet rooted to the place. She rejects the global pressure of consumer architecture, a fast breed of buildings that are out of place and context, and pledges to root her designs to the place informed by its climate and geography. She engages in extensive research on the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, working closely with geographers, landscape architects, planners, and other allied professionals. Her work also extends to the marginalized ultra-low-income population of the country with a goal to elevate the environmental and living conditions of all people. Her process-based practice model is internationally regarded as a model.
Tabassum’s Khudi Bari (Bengali for ‘tiny house’) is an example of a modular mobile home that, in Bangladesh, is inexpensive, durable, and relatively quick and easy to assemble and disassemble with minimum labor, taking advantage of a rigid space-frame structure to save goods and lives in the wake of flash floods on tiny ‘desert islands’ of sand known as ‘chars’ that precariously dot across the Bengal delta. Land is fluid on the floodplains of Bangladesh, and these islands often break off and erode into the water, forcing people to physically move their home. Khudi Bari reminds us to look to locally rooted knowledge to innovate solutions for uncertain futures. Desert X has commissioned a film about the project in which Tabassum addresses dry and wet cultures and the role of design in enabling life in some of the world’s most extreme climate conditions.”
“Héctor Zamora’s Chimera is a performative action in collaboration with street vendors who are ubiquitous in the Coachella Valley but often invisible in the landscape. The artist’s work provides opportunities for people to use materials differently and to break the rules to open new possibilities of expression and individuality, in this case transforming street vendors into walking sculptures made of balloons, which dissipate as visitors buy and take home the balloons and interact with the vendors in a space of dignity.”
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