Desert X

Desert X International art exhibitions activating natural landscapes through site-specific works.
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Desert X 2027
Oct 30, 2027 – May 7, 2028
Coachella Valley
(324)

Desert X 2023 is currently open through May 7 in Coachella Valley, CA.

As Pride Month continues, Desert X reflects on works that expand the understanding of belonging, visibility, and communi...
18/06/2026

As Pride Month continues, Desert X reflects on works that expand the understanding of belonging, visibility, and community.

For Desert X 2021, Felipe Baeza’s ‘Finding Home in My Own Flesh’ honored the q***r, immigrant, and historically marginalized communities that have long shaped the Coachella Valley, even when their stories have often been omitted from dominant narratives.

Depicting two hands cradling an emerging form of vines and flowers, the mural serves as both a memorial and an affirmation. Throughout his practice, Baeza explores what he calls ‘fugitive bodies,’ figures that exist in states of transformation and resist fixed definitions of identity.

Installed in the heart of Palm Springs, ‘Finding Home in My Own Flesh’ recognized those who are often unseen, while celebrating the spaces, histories, and communities that nurture and uplift them.

As Art Basel returns to Basel this week, Desert X alumni artists continue to shape conversations across the global conte...
15/06/2026

As Art Basel returns to Basel this week, Desert X alumni artists continue to shape conversations across the global contemporary art landscape.

On view at the fair are works by Torkwase Dyson, Kader Attia, Ibrahim Mahama, and Art Basel Awards medalist Maria Magdalena Campos Pons.

From the desert to the international stage, these artists continue to expand the possibilities of art, place, and public engagement.

Revisit their Desert X installations, and if you're visiting the fair, be sure to seek out their presentations: desertx.org

Welcome to Land Art 101, a new Desert X series exploring the ideas behind site-specific practice.To begin: What is land ...
08/06/2026

Welcome to Land Art 101, a new Desert X series exploring the ideas behind site-specific practice.

To begin: What is land art?

Land art is a form of contemporary art created in direct relationship with the landscape. Rather than existing inside a gallery, these works are shaped by the land itself and respond to elements like light, wind, time, and terrain.

Its roots extend far beyond the contemporary art world. From prehistoric observatories and burial mounds to the Nazca Lines and Indigenous earthworks across North America, humans have long used the land as a site for expression, ritual, and meaning.

While the term "land art" is often associated with artists working in the late 1960s and 1970s, the impulse to work directly with the earth predates the category itself. Long before the movement was named, artists were already engaging the landscape as material, site, and subject. As artist Agnes Denes has noted, there was no such thing as "land art" when she created her 'Bird Project' in Sweden in the 1950s, decades before her celebrated 'Wheatfield – A Confrontation.'

The history of land art is therefore broader and more complex than commonly told. Artists such as Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson, and many others approached the landscape in radically different ways, expanding conversations around identity, ecology, perception, and care.

Today, many of the practices once considered peripheral to the movement appear central to the ways we think about land, environment, and planetary systems.

At Desert X, artists work with the landscape as both material and collaborator, creating installations that open new ways of seeing, experiencing, and understanding the world around us.

Whose practice has expanded the way you think about art and landscape?

03/06/2026

What does it mean to create infrastructure for future life?

For Desert X 2023, Lauren Bon presented 'The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart,' a large-scale installation exploring water, ecology, and regeneration in the Coachella Valley.

Submerged within a pool filled with water from the Salton Sea, a lace-like steel sculpture modeled after the heart of a blue whale became both symbol and system, metabolizing water and energy over the course of the exhibition. Drawing connections between the desert’s ancient aquatic history and contemporary environmental realities, the work invited reflection on scarcity, transformation, and our relationship to the natural world.

Across her practice, Bon approaches art as a form of environmental and social infrastructure, creating what she calls “devices of wonder” that engage directly with systems of land, water, and collective survival.

Learn more about the work: https://desertx.org/dx/dx-23/lauren-bon

What lies beneath the surface? For Desert X 2017, Glenn Kaino’s 'Hollow Earth' transformed an abandoned shed into a spac...
27/05/2026

What lies beneath the surface?

For Desert X 2017, Glenn Kaino’s 'Hollow Earth' transformed an abandoned shed into a space of disorientation and introspection. Constructed from glass and wood, the work created the illusion of an impossibly deep shaft descending into the earth. Throughout his practice, Kaino explores the unseen systems that shape human experience, weaving together history, mythology, and political realities.

In 'Hollow Earth,' viewers leaned over an illuminated void that appeared to descend into infinite darkness. Yet what seemed to be a journey into the unknown ultimately revealed their own reflection, transforming the act of looking downward into an encounter with the self. In doing so, the work poses a simple but profound question: when we search beneath the world around us, what might we discover within ourselves?

Learn more about this work: https://desertx.org/dx/archive/hollow-earth

For nearly a decade, Desert X has invited artists and audiences to encounter contemporary art beyond the walls of the mu...
22/05/2026

For nearly a decade, Desert X has invited artists and audiences to encounter contemporary art beyond the walls of the museum.

Founded in California in 2017, Desert X presents recurring international exhibitions of site-specific work that engage directly with desert environments. Across the Coachella Valley and AlUla, artists respond to the landscape and to the ecological, cultural, and historical questions embedded within it.

Over the past ten years, Desert X has commissioned more than 130 works and welcomed more than two million visitors, creating a platform for dialogue across communities, geographies, and perspectives.

As Desert X approaches its 10th anniversary, the mission remains unchanged: to use art as a means of seeing the landscape, and ourselves, anew.

Pictured here is Claudia Comte’s ‘Curves and Zig Zags,’ created for the inaugural edition of Desert X in 2017.

Which Desert X works have stayed with you most?

This Friday, May 22, more than 100 Coachella Valley students are being recognized for their creativity in the Desert X A...
20/05/2026

This Friday, May 22, more than 100 Coachella Valley students are being recognized for their creativity in the Desert X Art Club Student Exhibition.

Opening at Melissa Morgan Fine Art in Palm Desert, the exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and multimedia works by elementary and middle school students from across the Desert Sands Unified School District.

Join us for the opening reception on Friday from 5–7 PM at the gallery on El Paseo.

Read more about the exhibition on NBC Palm Springs:
https://www.nbcpalmsprings.com/2026/05/19/desert-x-student-art-exhibition-showcases-creativity-of-coachella-valley-youth

Where do we first learn to belong? For Desert X AlUla 2026, Sara Abdu transforms a poem into landscape. In ‘A Kingdom Wh...
18/05/2026

Where do we first learn to belong?

For Desert X AlUla 2026, Sara Abdu transforms a poem into landscape. In ‘A Kingdom Where No One Dies,’ the artist records her voice and translates its waveforms into sculptural contours, converting sound into form.

Created from sand sourced in AlUla and Yemen, the work brings together two geographies central to Abdu’s own sense of identity. Shaped by light, shadow, and wind, the installation emerges from the desert as a meditation on memory, origin, and the possibility of belonging beyond borders.

“My intention is not to create a monument, but a quiet offering, a space for reflection, continuity and return, where the contours of a voice become part of the land’s ongoing story.”

14/05/2026

Last week, the 61st Venice Biennale officially opened, featuring works by seven Desert X alumni artists. including Himali Singh Soin & David Tappeser / Hylozoic/Desires.

The duo, who participated in the 2023 Coachella Valley edition of Desert X, creates work centered on the rhythms of love and the pulse of belonging. Their methodology draws on research into place and history to imagine speculative futures, bridging the musical language of jazz with the literary tradition of poetry. Their practice explores time, interdependence, and alterity, using rhythm to challenge linear perceptions and reveal intercultural entanglements, parallel histories, and more-than-human perspectives.

In this artist interview, h/d reflects on 'Namak Nazar,' a work that constructs an imagined cosmology through metaphors drawn from outer space and the natural world, exploring interference, distance, intimacy, and connection. Inspired by the proliferation of conspiracy cultures, from UFOlogy to cybernetic spirituality, the artists created a wooden pillar branching into loudspeakers, broadcasting a fictional narrative around Namak Nazar, a particle of salt tied to both the unraveling of climate systems and the possibility of renewal through introspection.

Experience the full program from May 9 to November 22, 2026, and following along for more Desert X alumni artists who are participating in the La Biennale di Venezia.

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