There is no museum that could contain art made on a truly monumental scale. It needs space to breathe. In turn, man-made architectural and artistic interventions have an almost paradoxical ability to articulate a landscape of already stunning natural beauty. It is these elements that make Desert X a much-anticipated staple of the art world calendar that always promises panoramas verging on the sublime. The 2025 edition is no different.
Once again, a crop of 11 artists from across the globe have had their site-specific ideas installed amid the sprawling, breathtaking landscapes of California’s Coachella Valley, which range from dusty, arid deserts to regions of luscious, green oasis.
Artistic director Neville Wakefield is back for the fifth edition, this time partnering with co-curator Kaitlin Garcia Maestas, and both hope that the exhibition will prompt some pause for reflection on the myth of “unadulterated nature” and the future of our relationship with the environment. “The realities of the world we live in now are both more complex and contested,” said Wakefield. “Time, light, and space permeate every aspect of this work but so too does an urgency to find new sustainable approaches to living in an increasingly imperiled world.”
Here is our pick of five top works to check out.
1. Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid
The Budapest-born, American conceptual artist Agnes Denes‘s The Living Pyramid overturns our assumptions about the desert topography by drawing on the abundant flora and fauna of Sunnylands Center & Gardens. The work was installed in November, and has already changed in form thanks to the constant growth of the its native vegetation. Indeed, the plants’ eventual death will also be part a natural part of the works evolution.
“My pyramids are an ointment to ease the wound,” explained Denes. “An optimistic edifice in a place of turmoil. It conveys the cycles of life as it renews itself from soil to seed to plant to blossom. It speaks many languages to all of humanity.”
2. Sanford Biggers, Unsui (Mirror)
California-native Sanford Biggers is best known for incorporating antique quilts into paintings and sculptural installations, which often deal with very painful histories. For Desert X, however, he has chosen to provide some light-hearted humor and the sky is, quite literally, the limit. The artist’s pair of glittering gray, cartoon clouds atop tall poles are a whimsically garish addition to the infinite blue. The name Unsui (Mirror) means “cloud and water” in Japanese, and refers to Biggers own personal relationship with Buddhism.
“I wanted to make something to remind viewers of the limitless possibilities of freedom, of being a cloud,” he said. “To be liberated and free from definition, limitations, and form. It is also an opportunity to meditate and be dreaming.”
3. Alison Saar, Soul Service Station
Though all the works at Desert X are best explored, rather than viewed, in person, it is Californian sculptor Alison Saar’s Soul Service Station that could never be summed up in just one photo, or even two. This fun twist on a classic Western gas station considers more than simply the most practical necessities. What if it is ourselves, not our machines, that are running on empty and need a top up before hitting the wide open road? Then we’d be relieved to chance upon Saar’s spiritual oasis, handcrafted by a community of artisans out of salvaged materials.
The gas station is manned by a larger-than-life statue of a woman who Saar has named Ruby. “When you think about the desert as being this landscape for opening your mind and letting go of all of those pressures,” the artist mused, “it just feels like a collaboration with the landscape itself.”
4. Cannupa Hanska Luger, G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)
The seemingly endless stretch of desert in Coachella Valley is usually admired while on the move, and Cannupa Hanska Luger’s unusual vehicle for G.H.O.S.T Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology) will be making some pitstops over the course of Desert X’s run. The artist lives in New Mexico but was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His shiny caravan’s wacky collection of accoutrements may even be capable of time travel, as it channels imagined, speculative futures that center the region’s Indigenous communities.
Luger explained that the van’s inhabitants are the “ancestors of these folks who developed and sustained a relationship with the land that was generative and passive and still didn’t lose style.” He said, “I pulled some of the technological forms of my people and reinvented them onto this vehicle, looking at Indigenous technology as a 20,000 year proof of concept. Once we recognize that we can look at the land with reverence rather than resource, we begin to understand not the value of being here, but the cost.”
5. Muhannad Shono
Saudi artist Muhannad Shono presented The Lost Path at Desert X AlUla 2020. Now, he infiltrating another renowned desert with What Remains, a work that fully embraces the destructive potential of the elements. You might even say these loose structures of fabric collaborate with the wind, becoming freely tangled or bundled over the course of Desert X’s run. After all, if we exit the heavily regulated atmosphere of the white cube gallery, we surely invite such unexpected elements of chaos.
“It started with this idea of, what is home, and how do you carry that with you?,” said Shono. “I grew up struggling with notions of home, trying to trace this line of earth back to what is home and realizing that there is no such place. When there is no place left that you call home that you can return to, what is left?”
Desert X 2025 runs through May 11.
