From February 25 through April 30, 2017, the first Desert X biennial presented site-specific, contemporary art works in the Coachella Valley. Writing about the project for KCET Artbound, Shana Nys Drambot observed, “The art is a busy person’s much-needed excuse, occasion, and anchor for an enterprise of duration, discovery, and slow-moving presence.”

“I learned this after a trip to Walter de Maria’s Lightning Fields,” says [Desert X curator Neville] Wakefield. I expected this Michelangelo-like epiphany of God creating the world but there was no such drama. Instead, there was a lot of watching the sky and walking the roughly square mile of the work and not knowing when to stop, when to turn back, when to just notice the microecologies that you pass on the way.”

Image: Phillip K Smith III, The Circle of Land and Sky, photo: Osceola Refetoff