Desert X Returns to Coachella Valley
11 site-specific installations that reflect the spirit of the region.
Desert X is back for its fifth U.S. edition, planting a suite of site-specific installations in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Curated by Neville Wakefield and Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, this year’s exhibition features the work of 11 international artists, each responding to the vast desert landscape, in a living dialogue of art, land and deep time.
The 2025 iteration spotlights the region’s resilient spirit, looking to the wisdom embedded in the timeless landscape as subject and focus. “Curated by the place it temporarily inhabits, Desert X reveals the [landscape] as a canvas of real and imagined histories, narrating tales of displacement, sovereignty and adaptation superimposed over visible testaments of time,” Garcia-Maestas noted in a recent statement.
Works on view explore themes of Indigenous futurism, design activism and emerging technologies, as seen in standouts like Sanford Biggers’ towering set of sequin sculptures; a blooming, pyramidal intervention by Agnes Denes; and Sarah Meyoha’s large-scale, light-bending ribbon. Ancestral knowledge and contemporary visions collide in this exploration of space, embracing the agency of nature through material and elemental forms.
“The land of Desert X is no longer the mythical and endless expanses of the American West but has come to include the effects of our ever-growing human presence,” Wakefield added. “Artists continue to be inspired by the idea of unadulterated nature but in its search, they have also come to recognize that this is an idea and that the realities of the world we live in now are both more complex and contested.”
Desert X Coachella Valley is now on view until May 11. Check out the festival’s website for more information on programming.
