Desert X 2025: 11 Art Installations Open in Coachella Valley
Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley Landscape
Table of Contents
- Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley Landscape
- Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley
- Desert X 2025 Exhibition Opens with 11 Art Installations in California’s Coachella Valley
- Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley
- Desert X 2025: Art Installations transform Coachella Valley Landscape
- The Fifth Edition of Desert X Opens in Coachella Valley
- Featured Art Installations at Desert X 2025
- Exploring Themes of Conversion
- Participating Artists
- Raphael Hefti: Five things you can’t wear on TV
- Event Details
- Sanford biggers’ Unsui (Mirror)
- Jose Dávila’s The act of being together
- Agnes Denes’ The Living Pyramid
Exploring the Intersection of Art, Nature, and Humanity in the California Desert
The Fifth edition of Desert X Opens in Coachella Valley
The highly anticipated Desert X exhibition, a site-specific international art exhibition, has launched its fifth edition across the Coachella Valley in california.Opening on March 10, 2025, this year’s event showcases eleven captivating installations that respond to the unique desert landscape.
Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia Maestas, Desert X 2025 invites artists to explore how we perceive a world “increasingly encircled by the transformational effects of nature and humanity.” The installations prompt reflection on the impact of both human activity and natural elements on our environment.
The exhibition,which is free and open to the public,runs through May 11,2025.It offers a unique possibility to experience art that engages with the environment in profound ways. Architecture,in this context,is seen as a key indicator of human impact,while elements like wind and light emphasize the ongoing transformations driven by both humanity and nature.
Featured Art Installations at Desert X 2025
Below are images and descriptions of some of the eleven art installations featured in this year’s Desert X exhibition.
exploring Themes of Conversion
The Desert X 2025 exhibition serves as a powerful reminder of the dynamic interplay between nature and human intervention. By situating these thought-provoking installations within the stark beauty of the Coachella Valley, the artists encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship with the environment and the forces that shape it.
Event Details
Event: Desert X 2025
Location: Coachella Valley, California
Dates: March 10, 2025 – May 11, 2025
Admission: Free
Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley
The Coachella Valley in California has been transformed into an open-air art gallery with the opening of Desert X 2025. Eleven thought-provoking art installations dot the landscape, inviting visitors to explore themes of environment, culture, and history.
Sanford Biggers’ Unsui (Mirror)
Sanford Biggers presents Unsui (Mirror), featuring two towering sequin sculptures set against the vast desert sky. These cloud-like forms, drawing from Buddhist ideology, represent unencumbered movement. The artist explains that unsui, meaning “clouds and water” in Japanese, embodies this concept.
Standing over 30 feet tall, the sequin clouds shimmer and shift with the sunlight and wind, symbolizing change and continuity. They forecast rain and storms while reflecting the interplay between natural phenomena and cultural symbolism.
Biggers’ installation is strategically located at the James O. Jessie Desert Highland Unity center in Palm Springs. This location is significant as it marks the site of a historic Black community established in the 1960s, following the forced displacement of residents of color from Section 14. Today, activists continue to work towards reparations for the families residing in Desert Highland Gateway Estates.
Jose Dávila’s The act of being together
Jose Dávila’s contribution, The act of being together, features unaltered marble blocks extracted from a quarry across the U.S.–Mexico border. These blocks, moved by unseen forces, evoke ancient relics and the potential for future life.
Drawing on Robert Smithson’s concept of site/non-site dialectics, Dávila connects the quarry and the installation site. He highlights the presence and absence of the rough-hewn forms. By relocating the material, Dávila establishes a relationship between the void of its origin and the presence it creates in the desert landscape.
Like ruins in reverse, Dávila’s marble formations suggest a suspended state of becoming, representing the end of something old and the beginning of something new.
Agnes Denes’ The Living Pyramid
Agnes Denes presents The Living Pyramid, a monumental sculpture and environmental intervention. Its hierarchical form echoes the idea of Sunnylands as the “Camp David of the American West,” a place where leaders convene “to promote world peace and facilitate international agreement.”
The pyramid is planted with native vegetation, its structure and appearance transforming with the desert environment’s growth cycles. This reflects the organic advancement of nature interacting with a human-made form.
Activated through educational programs, the installation promotes environmental awareness and conservation. It represents a social construct where people are responsible for its construction, planting, and ongoing care.
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s G.H.O.S.T.Ride expands his Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) series. This series uses speculative fiction to envision lasting, land-based futures for Indigenous communities.
The series imagines Indigenous communities utilizing innovative technologies to live in attunement with the land.
Desert X 2025 promises to be a captivating experience, blending art, landscape, and critical social commentary. The exhibition is open to the public, inviting exploration and reflection on the diverse themes presented by the artists.
Map of Desert X 2025 Locations Coming Soon!
Desert X 2025 Exhibition Opens with 11 Art Installations in California’s Coachella Valley
The Desert X 2025 exhibition has unveiled a series of captivating art installations across California’s Coachella Valley,transforming the desert landscape into an open-air museum. This year’s exhibition features 11 unique works, each engaging with the environment and inviting visitors to contemplate themes of space, light, and sustainability.
Featured Art Installations
Five things you can’t wear on TV / Raphael Hefti
Raphael Hefti’s installation employs a black woven polymer fiber, originally intended for durable fire hoses, coated with a reflective finish on one side. This material is stretched taut between two distant points, creating “a single line or artificial horizon.” The tension in the material causes it to oscillate in the wind, producing a visual effect reminiscent of “a gently strummed guitar string.”
This kinetic movement blurs the viewer’s perception of space, scale, and distance.According to the exhibition’s description, “Wind, weather, and ambient light amplify this seemingly arbitrary movement, transforming it into an environmental condition.” By bisecting the air, Five things you can’t wear on TV highlights the interplay of light and space, showcasing “the poetry of a climatic phenomenon.”
Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams / Sarah Meyohas
Sarah Meyohas’ immersive installation features “caustics,” light patterns created by the refraction or reflection of light through curved surfaces. Meyohas uses light-shaping technology to project sunlight onto “a ribbon-like structure cascading across the desert floor.”
The installation evokes ancient timekeeping methods and pays tribute to 20th-century land art.Each mirrored panel, designed with computer algorithms for light manipulation, displays a unique pattern, spelling out the phrase, “truth arrives in slanted beams.” As visitors adjust the mirrors, they may encounter “unexpected visual illusions (waves, moiré patterns, or perhaps a mirage),” evoking a sense of longing for water in the desert.
Adobe Oasis / Ronald Rael
Ronald Rael’s Adobe Oasis showcases conventional craft techniques in wood, stone, earth, and textiles as sustainable solutions.The work draws on over 10,000 years of earthen building history, providing “a counterpoint to the environmental impact of modern architecture.”
The installation enhances the advantages of adobe—”low cost, energy efficiency, fire resistance, and non-toxicity”—with technological advancements in additive manufacturing.Adobe Oasis was constructed using a 3D printing process, employing robotic programming to create structures entirely from mud. The “corrugated earthen ribbons mimic the texture of palm trees,” inspired by the legacy of Coachella Valley’s palm oases. This project serves as “both an artistic endeavor and a research initiative,” inviting visitors into a landscape that frames views of the land and sky, promoting solitude and connection.
Soul Service Station / Alison Saar
Soul Service Station is a reimagining of a sculptural intervention Alison Saar created in 1986 in Roswell, New Mexico. Inspired by gas stations of the American West, it offers “more than practical services; it provides fuel for the soul.”
Inside,a handcrafted sculptural assemblage contains devotional objects. These elements, combined with furnishings made from salvaged materials, create “a sanctuary that merges collective dreams with Saar’s vision of a spiritual oasis.” A life-size, hand-carved female figure stands at the center, serving as “the guardian and healer of the site.” A repurposed gas pump plays poems by Los Angeles-based poet Harryette Mullen, enriching the experience. Saar’s Soul Service Station functions as “a sanctuary for travelers, a place to pause, heal, and carry forward aspirations, histories, and voices.”
What Remains / Muhannad Shono
Muhannad Shono’s work explores themes of memory, loss, and transformation within the desert landscape. The installation invites viewers to contemplate the ephemeral nature of existence and the enduring power of the environment.
Desert X 2025: Art Installations Transform Coachella Valley
Eleven captivating art installations have opened in California’s Coachella Valley as part of Desert X 2025, inviting visitors to engage with the desert landscape in new and meaningful ways. the Desert X 2025 exhibition, a recurring event, showcases site-specific works that respond to the unique environmental and social context of the Coachella Valley.
Muhannad Shono: What Remains
Muhannad Shono’s installation, What Remains, presents a dynamic vision of land, constantly evolving under the forces of nature. Long strips of fabric, infused with native sand, move freely, accentuating the ever-changing state of the dunes. Aligned with the prevailing winds, these fabric strips trace the ground’s contours, creating a fibrillating effect just above the surface.
As wind directions shift, the natural process of aeolian transportation, which shapes dunes, is disrupted, causing the fabric to tangle into chaotic bundles. Shono describes his work as existing in a state of tremor,
suspended between gravity and the relentless power of the wind. This installation exemplifies the Desert X art experience.
Kimsooja: To Breathe – Coachella Valley
Kimsooja’s To Breathe – Coachella Valley features a glass structure that serves as a performance space, encouraging interaction with the desert’s essential elements: sand, air, and light. By applying an optical film to the glass surface, Kimsooja transforms the architecture into a vibrant spectrum of light and color.
According to Kimsooja, this diffraction film acts as a obvious textile, featuring thousands of vertical and horizontal scratch lines akin to warp and weft, and envelops the architecture in light.
This installation echoes its counterpart in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, while also acknowledging the Light and Space movement’s origins on the U.S. West Coast. The unveiling of this installation, along with Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibit, took place on March 15 and will remain on view through June 1, 2025. This piece highlights the Coachella Valley art scene.
Kapwani Kiwanga: plotting Rest
Kapwani Kiwanga’s pavilion, Plotting Rest, explores themes of shelter and freedom, drawing inspiration from midcentury design in Palm Springs. Its triangular lattice roof creates shifting patterns of light and shadow, reminiscent of quilting patterns associated with the Underground Railroad and themes of migration and hope. This exhibit, alongside Kimsooja’s, opened on March 15 and will be available for viewing untill June 1, 2025.
Featured Artists
The Desert X 2025 exhibition showcases a diverse group of artists, each bringing unique perspectives and creative approaches to the desert landscape. Here’s a list of the featured artists:
- Sanford Biggers, b. Los angeles, CA, USA. 1970, based in New York, NY, USA
- jose Dávila, b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974, based in Guadalajara, Mexico
- Agnes Denes, b. Budapest, Hungary, 1931, based in New York, NY, USA
- Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota, b. Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, USA, 1979, based in Glorieta, New Mexico, USA
- Raphael Hefti, b. Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1978, based in Zurich, Switzerland
- kimsooja, b. Daegu, Korea, 1957, based in Seoul, South Korea and Paris, France
- Kapwani Kiwanga, b.hamilton, Canada, 1978, based in Paris, France
- Sarah Meyohas, b.New York, NY, USA, 1991, based in New York, NY, USA
- Ronald Rael, b. Conejos Country, CO, USA,1971, based in Berkeley, CA, USA
- Alison Saar, b. in Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1956, based in Los Angeles, CA, USA
- Muhannad Shono, b. in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 1977, based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Raphael Hefti: Five things you can’t wear on TV
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Desert X 2025: Art Installations transform Coachella Valley Landscape
Exploring the Intersection of Art,Nature,and Humanity in the California Desert
The Fifth Edition of Desert X Opens in Coachella Valley
The highly anticipated Desert X exhibition, a site-specific international art exhibition, has launched its fifth edition across the Coachella Valley in California. Opening on March 10, 2025, this year’s event showcases eleven captivating installations that respond to the unique desert landscape.
Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia Maestas,Desert X 2025 invites artists to explore how we perceive a world “increasingly encircled by the transformational effects of nature and humanity.” The installations prompt reflection on the impact of both human activity and natural elements on our environment.
The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, runs through May 11, 2025. It offers a unique possibility to experience art that engages with the environment in profound ways. Architecture, in this context, is seen as a key indicator of human impact, while elements like wind and light emphasize the ongoing transformations driven by both humanity and nature.
Desert X is committed to supporting art that engages with pressing contemporary issues. It seeks to foster dialog and understanding through site-specific installations that respond to the social, political, and ecological realities of the Coachella Valley.
Featured Art Installations at Desert X 2025
Below are images and descriptions of some of the eleven art installations featured in this year’s Desert X exhibition.
Exploring Themes of Conversion
The Desert X 2025 exhibition serves as a powerful reminder of the dynamic interplay between nature and human intervention. By situating these thought-provoking installations within the stark beauty of the Coachella Valley, the artists encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship with the environment and the forces that shape it.
Participating Artists
Desert X 2025 features a diverse group of artists. here’s a list of the artists and their locations:
- a, b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974, based in Guadalajara, Mexico
- Agnes denes, b.Budapest, Hungary, 1931, based in New York, NY, USA
- Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota, b. standing Rock Reservation,North Dakota,USA,1979,based in Glorieta,New Mexico,USA
- Raphael Hefti,b. Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1978, based in Zurich, Switzerland
- kimsooja, b. Daegu, Korea, 1957, based in seoul, South Korea and Paris, france
- Kapwani Kiwanga, b.hamilton, Canada, 1978, based in Paris, France
- Sarah Meyohas, b.New York, NY, USA, 1991, based in New York, NY, USA
- Ronald Rael, b. Conejos Country, CO, USA,1971, based in Berkeley, CA, USA
- Alison Saar, b. in Los Angeles,CA,USA,1956,based in Los Angeles,CA,USA
- Muhannad Shono,b. in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia,1977,based in Riyadh,Saudi Arabia
Raphael Hefti: Five things you can’t wear on TV
Event Details
Event: desert X 2025
Location: Coachella Valley,California
Dates: March 10,2025 – May 11,2025
Admission: Free
website: desertx.org
Sanford biggers’ Unsui (Mirror)
Sanford Biggers presents Unsui (Mirror),featuring two towering sequin sculptures set against the vast desert sky. These cloud-like forms, drawing from Buddhist ideology, represent unencumbered movement. The artist explains that unsui,meaning “clouds and water” in Japanese,embodies this concept.
Standing over 30 feet tall, the sequin clouds shimmer and shift with the sunlight and wind, symbolizing change and continuity. They forecast rain and storms while reflecting the interplay between natural phenomena and cultural symbolism.
Biggers’ installation is strategically located at the James O.Jessie Desert Highland Unity center in Palm Springs. This location is significant as it marks the site of a historic Black community established in the 1960s, following the forced displacement of residents of color from Section 14. Today, activists continue to work towards reparations for the families residing in Desert Highland Gateway Estates.
Jose Dávila’s The act of being together
Jose Dávila’s contribution, The act of being together, features unaltered marble blocks extracted from a quarry across the U.S.–Mexico border. These blocks, moved by unseen forces, evoke ancient relics and the potential for future life.
Drawing on Robert Smithson’s concept of site/non-site dialectics, Dávila connects the quarry and the installation site. He highlights the presence and absence of the rough-hewn forms. By relocating the material, Dávila establishes a relationship between the void of its origin and the presence it creates in the desert landscape.
Like ruins in reverse, Dávila’s marble formations suggest a suspended state of becoming, representing the end of something old and the beginning of something new.
Agnes Denes’ The Living Pyramid
Agnes Denes presents The Living Pyramid, a monumental sculpture and environmental intervention. Its hierarchical form echoes the idea of Sunnylands as the “Camp David of the American West,” a place where leaders convene “to promote world peace and facilitate international agreement.”
The pyramid is planted with native vegetation, its structure and appearance transforming with the desert environment’s growth cycles.