California landscape art series#

“We’re going from a climate-controlled museum environment to a climate that is out of control,” Wakefield says, noting the recent “hurriquake” that rocked Palm Springs.

“We were able to scratch the surface, but there is more to the conversation,” says Garcia-Maestas.Īnd this time the setting-or collaborator-will be the Western landscape itself, as Desert X is spread out over many outdoor sites in the Palm Springs area. One twist: the Arkansas show included 19th-century Westernpaintings from the Crystal Bridges collection by the likes of George Catlin and Jasper Francis Cropsey to put the conflicting ideologies into dialogue.ĭesert X will give the curators, they say, a more expansive venue to explore such issues of “Indigenous sovereignty, postcolonial history” and more.

California landscape art series#

The show included two artists familiar to Desert X regulars: Nicholas Galanin, who planted the epic sign spelling out “Indian land” for his Never Forget artwork in Desert X 2021, and Xaviera Simmons, who did a series of billboards that year.

That show featured seven artists confronting the frontier mythology-some would say pathology-of the American West, with its whitewashing of the history of violence against Native Americans. It was while working at the Momentary that she got to know Wakefield and invited him to co-curate the 2022 exhibition, A Divided Landscape, with her.ĭesert X artistic director Neville Wakefield (left) and Desert X 2025 co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas (right) Wakefield: courtesy Desert X Garcia-Maestas: Luis Corzo, courtesy Desert X Garcia-Maestas is used to being in two places at once, having split time during the pandemic years between Arkansas, where she was a curator with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s contemporary art satellite, The Momentary, and New Mexico, where she grew up. But I’m really lucky that the board and executive leadership of Socrates have been really supportive of this opportunity,” she says. “Historically most if not all of the previous co-curators for Desert X have had an institutional affiliation, so it’s somewhat common.

Today the organisation is announcing the co-curator of its 2025 edition: Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, who is curator and director of exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, and will remain in that job. And their decision to bring on co-curators like César García Alvarez and Diana Campbell to work with artistic director Neville Wakefield has helped democratise and energise successive editions. Its organisers have begun using land acknowledgements and art commissions both to pay homage to the Cahuilla Indians who long preceded the region’s white settlers. Since the first edition of Desert X in 2017, which featured site-specific installations by art stars like Richard Prince, Doug Aitken and Tavares Strachan with very few women and no local Native American artists participating, the Coachella Valley biennial has done some soul searching.