Could the future of art fairs look less like a white-walled convention centre and more like a dusty motel in the Old West? In the high desert of Southern California, the High Desert Art Fair (HDAF) made the case for an unorthodox art fair model last weekend. With lower costs and a novel location near Joshua Tree, the fair is part of a broader shift in the market as collectors and gallerists alike grow weary of riding the same art fair circuit and seek to wrangle new audiences.
Pioneertown, located around 35 miles north of Palm Springs, appears at first glance to be an abandoned 1880s frontier settlement, complete with wooden saloons, a bank, a bathhouse and a jail. In actuality, it was built in the 1950s as a film set for Hollywood productions, more recently serving as a backdrop for the 2017 film starring Aubrey Plaza, Ingrid Goes West.
The Pioneertown Motel was where actors like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers once hung their hats after long days of shooting. Over the weekend, a new cast rotated through rooms and dusty grounds at the motel—the art crowd. The HDAF’s co-founder Nicholas Fahey says the organisers’ aim is to give dealers a distinctive setting without a punishing overhead to participate; rooms for galleries were priced at $3,500, well below the cost of a stand at most major art fairs.
Dorado 806 Projects’ room at the High Desert Art Fair. Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
“We started this because gallerists were in such a strange space in terms of how much (fairs) cost and how much you have to sell just to break even,” Fahey says. “It allows established and mid-career galleries to show things they want to develop and get excited about to an audience. And it allows new galleries to take a chance and take risks.”
The fair also appeals to participants’ and attendees’ wanderlust. “How many times are you gonna go to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong?” Fahey says. “I hear from collectors all the time—they get fair fatigue. They’re like, ‘Why am I going to go to six art fairs a year? It’s the same galleries selling the same thing and the same artist.’”
The experience of the HDAF is certainly unique. Visitors last weekend perused the 19 rooms at the Pioneertown Motel and at least a dozen dogs were present at the fair—with varying degrees of interest in the art on view. Prices for works ranged from a few hundred dollars to five figures, alongside a selection of publishers selling books, zines and works on paper.
“I want all different types of people to walk away from here and have something that they can have as a part of their experience,” Fahey says.
The artists (left to right) Ry Rocklen, Phillip K. Smith, Ryan Schneider and Gisela Colon and moderator Andrew Berardini speak on a panel about artists working in the desert. Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
Part of the fair’s draw is its off-site programming, which encourages visitors to explore the surrounding area. Near the motel along Pioneertown’s Mane Street, visitors stopped by shops full of tchotchkes and Western wear and even a petting zoo. Live music at local watering holes like Pappy & Harriet’s and The Red Dog Saloon added a honky-tonk edge, while the artist Shepard Fairey performed a DJ set on Friday night. Organised tours spotlighted desert artists including Andrea Zittel and the late Noah Purifoy. With a relatively small VIP contingent, the same faces reappeared throughout the weekend, giving the fair a social, close-knit feel. According to the organisers, around 4,000 visitors attended the fair over the weekend, quadruple last year’s attendance.
That success reflects a broader market shift. A 2025 Deloitte survey found millennials prioritise spending on travel, dining and live events over traditional assets, a trend shaped by rising student debt, housing costs and inflation. The result is growing interest in destination fairs that double as a novel holiday. For many collectors and dealers, the standard fair model of piling into a convention centre in an expensive hub city no longer holds the same appeal, making a weekend in the desert (or in the mountains, or at the beach) an attractive proposition.
“It’s really seeped in local lure and knowledge, and has the history of being home to artists,” says the Los Angeles-based dealer Megan Mulrooney about the high desert. “There’s this incredible sensibility out here, and a love for the making of things. I was really attracted to it for that reason, but I also love showing in an unusual space—the unusual topography, and being in the high desert is one of those things.”
Mulrooney’s eponymous gallery showed work by the Austin-based artist RF. Alvarez, who already has a strong collector base in nearby Palm Springs. His Old Masters-influenced paintings of queer domestic life in the American South resonate locally, where Western mythology overlaps with a history of discretion. Palm Springs once served as a getaway for stars escaping studio morality clauses during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and the city is still home—or a vacation home—to a large queer community. One of Alvarez’s paintings is also on view in the Palm Springs Art Museum’s current exhibition A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit (until 18 October), which explores how magic and its influence has shaped queer expressions in art and culture.
Notes on A Heritage II (The Cruiser) (2026) by RF. Alvarez. Courtesy Megan Mulrooney Gallery
Among Alvarez’s latest works is a smouldering portrait of Al Parker, the late activist and adult film star who advocated for safer sex practices and died of Aids-related complications in 1992 at age 40. The painting sold at the fair for $11,000 to a local Palm Springs collector.
For all its mythologised remoteness, the high desert remains closely tied to broader national issues. Driving along the US Route 62 toward Pioneertown, billboards and roadside memorials pay tribute to victims of police violence. On the day the fair opened, visitors drove past hundreds of Yucca Valley residents taking part in a No Kings protest, part of nationwide demonstrations against US president Donald Trump. The region may be attracting more second or even third home buyers, but much of its year-round population is working-class.
The fair donated a room to the Yucca Valley artist-run gallery Quality Coins, to raise funds for immigrant mutual aid and legal fees to oppose a proposed gated community in nearby Joshua Tree. By high noon on Sunday, the artist Ryan Schneider said around $15,000 had been raised through sales in the Quality Coins room, with works priced from around $300 to $3,000.
A view of the Quality Coins room at the High Desert Art Fair Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
“When I realised collectors are going to be coming out here and spending money, I thought, ‘Instead of just selling art, let’s try to use the money to help this community,’” Schneider says. “There has to be a community element to this, and with great people coming in from LA and out of town, I wanted to make sure that local artists were represented.”
In much of the high desert, where unincorporated land means limited oversight, tensions around real estate run high. The same loose zoning regulations that have historically allowed artist studios to flourish has also attracted speculative development, driven by rising visitor numbers to nearby Joshua Tree National Park. Visitor figures at that park increased by 119% between 2011 and 2021, according to the National Park Service, and peaked at 3.3 million in 2023. A surge in short-term rentals in the region has strained housing availability and become a “huge problem” for the community, Schneider says.
“We want people to come out here and visit and invest in the community, but there’s a lot of parasitic investment,” Schneider says. “If you’re gonna come out here and buy a home, do something that contributes somehow to the actual community.”
