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Desert X, the free biennial art exhibition and now one of greater Palm Spring's largest recurring events, hopes to return soon for its third edition.
Desert X 2021 was scheduled to be held February 6 - April 11 with works displayed from the Desert Hot Springs to the west and the Salton Sea to the east. However, weeks before it was set to debut, organizers decided to postpone the event. It has since been rescheduled for March 12 - May 16.
"It's hard to predict anything given that we are living through this pandemic," Desert X Founder and President Susan Davis told Desert Magazine. "However, I can say that we will mount Desert X in a safe way. We intend to provide the same quality of public programs, both on-site as well as virtually, and we will showcase some of the most exciting artists working today."
Desert X 2021 in the Coachella Valley Desert, among the first -- if not the first -- large-scale exhibition events presented since the beginning of the global pandemic, is produced by The Desert Biennial, a 501(C)3 charitable organization, and presented by Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille.
The exhibition is a few years old with roots that run deep. Desert X is the creation of Davis and a group of philanthropists and art lovers in the greater Palm Springs area.
"The idea was to share the beauty, the histories and the cultural complexities of the Coachella Valley with a large global and local audience," Desert X Executive Director Jenny Gil said. "It was conceived as a non-profit organization that would organize recurrent contemporary art exhibitions at sites across the Coachella Valley – free, open and accessible to all."
Davis quickly found like-minded enthusiasts who bought into the idea in 2015.
"When Susan Davis first approached me about Desert X, her idea of a recurring site-specific desert exhibition meshed perfectly with my own interest in land art and the journeys of discovery and exploration it proposed," Desert X Artistic Director Neville Wakefield said.
Work by "the so-called land art pioneers" had already led Wakefield to the American West, introducing him to the locales' desert-scapes.
"This model of art that was institutionally unconstrained was appealing, even as the history and execution was often deeply problematic," Wakefield said. "So the idea of taking this legacy and reconfiguring it in ways that avoided the male-dominated remoteness of the past was compelling. I was also drawn to the idea of a show that was curated by the landscape - environmental, social, historic rather than by decree, and for which the conversations arise organically from interactions with the surroundings rather than being imposed upon them."
Desert X's first and second events made clear the economic benefits of the art-in-the-desert exhibits, and organizers "are now working hard to include and explore social and environmental issues," Wakefield said. "For this next exhibition, we are working in collaboration with the Mojave Land Management Trust to mitigate environmental impact, as well as reaching out to the diversity of communities that represent the Coachella Valley to invite participation in specific artist works including one that engages children from the local school districts."
One of the "defining differences" between Desert X 2021 and its two prior exhibitions "is a broadened approach to our understanding of the landscape," Desert X 2021 Co-Curator Cesar Garcia Alvarez said.
"We began this project thinking of the region not just as a physical landscape forged by natural forms but also as a terrain sustained by people and stories," Alvarez said. "What large-scale exhibitions around the globe often establish as an opposition between 'the local' vs. 'the global' will be considered differently in our show - not as a binary but rather as a more nuanced set of relationships that are always intertwined. To achieve that. we looked to people - to the ones leading and supporting organizations that uplift communities, to organizers and small business owners and city officials and cultural makers who make the Coachella Valley the special place that it is."
The platform for artists remains and what a canvas Desert X presents.
"Many artists, when they visit the Coachella Valley, are confronted for the first time with the monumentality of the desert and the complex stories of the communities that have shaped this region of Southern California," Gil said. "We like to think of Desert X as an opportunity for artists to work outside of institutional and gallery walls, and to dream big!"
Desert X has cemented the careers of artists such as Doug Aitken, famed for last year's "Mirage" mirror art, and Sterling Ruby, whose works include the fluorescent orange monolith SPECTER. Each exhibition has proven an inspiration to other artists as well.
"It’s when an artist such as Sherin Guirgus works for the first time on a large-scale outdoor project or Nancy Baker Cahill breaks the boundaries of visual containment with a pair of AR/VR works that Desert X is at its most successful and engaging," Wakefield said.
Guirgus, in his own comments to Desert Magazine, reflected on the importance of art informing life.
“Desert environments and communities have long been marginalized and are often neglected," Guirgus said. "For me, engaging in a conversation around the arts' power to create platforms where few exist is essential to my practice. It is so important, especially now, to continue to bring contemporary art into public spaces and create access to publics and communities that don’t feel comfortable or even welcome in institutional art spaces."
The event certainly has been a success. Desert X 2019 brought in more than 400,000 visitors and produced an economic impact of about $18 million, according to the Americans for the Arts latest survey.
The lengthy international ordeal that has been the worldwide pandemic has not-at-all dampened the human need to create and consume art, an intense hunger that Desert X fills.
"Now more than ever, people are looking for new ways to experience art, and in large part, that’s exactly what Desert X has been modeling," Wakefield said. "While the idea of site-responsive art is certainly not new, putting this kind of art in conversation not just with its environment but with that of other deserts and desert cultures - and opening it up, free and accessible to all, allows the exhibition to slip easily between the local and the global, between the conditions we call our own and those of others."
The decision to move forward with the 2021 event came shortly before vaccines were announced and people began to hope that the pandemic might begin to lift. It was in that still-gloomy environment that Desert X organizers had to decide "whether to postpone the show and wait for some sense of 'normalcy' to return or to think about this iteration as an acknowledgment that the world we now live in is transformed and that exhibitions in that world will inevitably be conceived, executed, and experienced differently," Alvarez said.
"We decided to move forward after thoughtful consideration and close conversations with our collaborating artists," Alvarez continued, adding that the event is "uniquely positioned" as an outdoor event that "allows us to create an exhibition experience that takes into account the safety of our visitors."
"In commissioning these works, we also hope to be able to be a small part of the start of a recovery," Alvarez said. "Many artists had shows or engagements that did not manifest (in 2020), and we thought it was important to be able to start providing support and opportunities for artists through this platform."
Among this year's artists is the educator based in Joshua Tree, Kim Stringfellow, whose focus is in landscape and how humans interact with or within it.
"My artistic practice is centered around bringing people into the land to experience it directly through a variety of media including the audio tour format," she said. "For the past 20 years, my work and research have focused on arid regions of the American Southwest with an emphasis on California’s deserts. When Desert X was initiated in 2017, I was excited about the possibility for artists to expand upon the land art movement of the 1960/70s to create innovative, challenging and sustainably-driven artworks that don’t simply incorporate the greater Coachella Valley as a scenic backdrop but help us understand the ecological implications of our presence within it."
Stringfellow's participation in this year's event "will be an important career milestone as it will bring international awareness to my largely regionally focused creative practice," she said.
"Additionally, by revisiting Jackrabbit Homestead, a multimedia endeavor I originally conceived and launched in 2009 for Desert X 2021, I am able to physically actualize a Small Tract homesteader cabin, which is a component of this project that I had always hoped to produce," she said.
Desert X 2021 also aims to do other "great things," Wakefield said.
"My hope is that the impulses of land art – that is really curated by place, that is both anti-institutional and anti-material -- as well as the contributions of Co-Curator Cesar Garcia Alvarez, and our interest in bridging local and global communities and the environment - will drive a show that will be both challenging and popular," he said.
Desert X's website is here:
https://www.desertx.org
DesertX social media handles are:
Instagram: @_desertx
Facebook: @desertx
Official Desert X hashtags:
#desertx
#desertx2021
#dx21
