The Final Frontier

A sea of dusty brown hills and dry brush make up California’s Coachella Valley. This auburn landscape is the backdrop for Desert X, an international, site-specific exhibition organized by the Dessert Biennial, which runs from March 8 to May 11, 2025. For the 5th edition, curators Neville Wakefield and Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas invited artists such as Sanford Biggers, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Agnes Denes to repurpose architecture as an expressive dialogue that spans the land’s history as the sacred home of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Native American  tribe and its natural ecosystem.

Biggers’ cloud shaped, sequined sculpture Unsui (Mirror), 2025, stands in the middle of the desert and reflects the sky, mirroring the unforgiving yet promising climate of the environment. Soul Service Station, Alison Saar’s 1986 sculpture of a man sitting at a gas station reframes the roadside stop as a spiritual site to recharge, as well as a metaphor for the Great Migration, in which African Americans left the South. The works’ location outdoors, within the immediate environment, goes back to the principles of the late ‘60s Land Art movement, in which wild landscapes, particularly the deserts of the American West, inspired artists such as Robert Smithson. His 1970’s earthwork, Spiral Jetty is a working piece of land, created with 6,000 tons of black, basalt rocks coiled counterclockwise at the Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake. Since the era of Smithson and his contemporaries like Andy Goldsworthy and Michael Heizer, Land Art has expanded to include perspectives beyond the white male explorer. Early contributors to Land Art’s shifting identity, Lita Albuquerque and Iman Issa have shown their work at Desert X in prior editions. 

This March, nestled only two hours from Los Angeles, the sandy terrain becomes a mirage of artistic imagination. Following in the footsteps of past years which have taken place in AIUla, an ancient city in Saudi Arabia, the exhibition asks the viewer to consider the ever-escalating evolution of the desert landscape and ways humans both connect to and interfere with the  environment.

Desert X 2025 runs March 8th to May 11th, 2025 at Coachella Valley California.