After a postponement due to pandemic stay-at-home orders, Desert X 2021 is in its final weeks of a 9-week run (through May 16) to multiple locations across the Coachella Valley in California. Visitors to the site can download a mobile app for the exact locations and information on the artwork.

This third edition of the international art exhibition was organized by the artistic director of Desert X Neville Wakefield and co-curator Cesar García-Alvarez.

“For Desert X 2021, we took inspiration from the way deserts form, natural processes that alter their surfaces and expand their geography,” García-Alvarez said. “By acting on this place, the projects seek to identify and elevate the least”

Among the first artistic experiences in the region since the widespread closures, Desert X offers outdoor environments that are safe, free and open to all. Recently commissioned works explore themes of land and property rights, the desert as a border, migration, water exploitation, social justice, racial narratives of the West, the gendered landscape and the role of people. women and young people.

The installations adapted to the site of a dozen renowned international contemporary artists activate the desert landscape, both as a place and as an idea.

“As much as the desert is a state of place, it is also a state of mind. Its boundaries are not singular but multiple, and they are defined as much by social geography as by physical boundaries, ”said Wakefield. “Desert X 2021 seeks to explore this idea of ​​the desert as a place where marginalized and migrants – whose voices and stories may have struggled to manifest in mainstream discourses of growth and development – can also be heard. “

In What is behind the walls, Zahrah Alghamdi creates a monumental sculptural wall, which, like a geological extrusion, reveals the different strata of time as they have been captured both over the millennia of geological transformation and the last centuries of rapid development thus connecting the desert landscape of Coachella to the transformations of other deserts around the world.

Women’s qualities through Ghada Amer is a social project that has interviewed various communities within the Coachella Valley, whose representations take the form of gardens of words that depend on nature, care and other activities traditionally associated with femininity.

Felipe Baezathe fresco of Find a home in my own flesh will soon be visible, say the organizers. It will represent two hands enveloping a cloud of vines and flowers, speaking of the erasure of marginalized peoples both from official narratives and from our collective imaginations.

In The wishing well, Serge Attukwei Clottey talks about the challenges that various communities face when accessing safe drinking water. Structures made from Kufuor gallons, used in rural Ghana to bring water from springs to homes, echo a standing well, a place to travel in search of what should be a more accessible natural resource. .

Never forget through Nicolas galanin addresses the question of monuments and what they commemorate, functioning both as an awareness and a call to action, which by linking up with the landback movement, questions the ideas of land on which the land art movement has been historically based.

Requiring a steep climb to get there (and reservation recommended), Alicja Kwadethe sculptural work of ParaPivot (endless clouds) is both an atomic model and a geological proposition. The seemingly icy stone fragments, unlike the desert, refer to current global issues, to ideas about space – both micro and macro, the relativity and time between terrestrial earth and outer space.

In a new chapter of his current project Frequencies, specially modified for the home learning experience brought about by the pandemic, Oscar Murillo is working with hundreds of youth in Coachella Valley schools to expand an archive, via student canvases, that tracks youth experiences through tagging.

Christophe myers‘ The art of taming horses explores the relationship between myth and history to shed light on lesser-known stories from the region. Through a new series of equestrian sculptures adorned with narrative banners, Myers tells of African Americans who traveled south to escape bondage and Mexican-Americans who traveled north for a better life. Through a fictional story of a pair of cowboy friends, an African American and a Mexican, Myers shed light on the kind of life these communities could have had here one day.

In The passenger, a large-scale labyrinth structure made of woven palm fiber walls, Eduardo Sarabia examines the desert as a border through the trope of travel, a motif that connects people across geographies and cultures.

Xaviera simmons uses billboards in Because you know that in the end we will form a militia to create a language and an image that confront white stereotypes and the complicity in the narratives that shape our societal structures.

In a diorama depicting the life of one of the first settlers, Kim stringfellow‘s Jackrabbit Property tells one of the lesser-known stories of desert lands owned by homesteader Jackrabbit, which began in 1938 with Southern California’s Small Tract Act.

Inspired by images of the region which helped build his visual imagination, Viviane Suter‘s Tamanrasset is an installation of paintings and light inside an iconic Modernist building. The work translates the desert terrain, as an image, into abstract shapes and colors, drawing attention to the desert as a state with emotional and psychological dimensions.

Judy Chicago, known for her innovation over a 50-year career, planned to unveil a new piece of smoke (and nontoxic), Live smoke, to celebrate the desert. Organizers noted that she had chosen not to go ahead with the alternative location of her project.

Visit Desert X for more information and to download the visitors application.