Desert X artists dig beneath the sandy surface

PALM SPRINGS, Calif .– The odds were perfectly even at the Desert X Biennale which takes place this year. Larger, better organized destination exhibits have floundered on their plans since the pandemic hit, and even in the best years, Desert X, which commissions site-specific public art in and around Palm Springs, has trouble raising funds to carry out his projects. His decision two years ago to accept funding from the Saudi government for a spinoff event prompted prominent board members to step down and artists to come forward.

And the guest curator chosen for the 2021 edition, César García-Alvarez, fell ill with Covid-19 last year, as he began working with artists to develop their projects. “I was very sick from mid-March to the end of May, and still am; I am a Covid long haul, ”he said.

“It was difficult to put on a show like this during a pandemic, I think we’re all very honest about it,” he added. “But it was important to keep doing this and to keep supporting artists.”

Neville Wakefield, who is the artistic director of Desert X and co-curator of its third edition, agrees. “We never considered canceling it,” he said of the show, which opens Friday. “Just the opposite. The fact that we are outside and are free for the public has made our goal more urgent in some ways. While Los Angeles museums have been closed for a year, we felt responsible for doing what our fortified institutions could not and nurturing the need for culture.

The Biennale is smaller than usual, showcasing the work of 13 artists compared to as many as 19 in years past, with a more compact footprint. “We didn’t know if the hotels would be open, so we put on a show that someone from Los Angeles or San Diego could see by car in one day,” García-Alvarez said. (They set up hand sanitizing stations on some works of art and “health ambassadors” on others to distribute masks and ensure social distancing.)

The show features works by several international artists, including Alicja Kwade from Berlin, Serge Attukwei Clottey from Accra, Ghana; Oscar Murillo from La Paila, Colombia; Eduardo Sarabia from Guadalajara, Mexico; and Vivian Suter from Panajachel, Guatemala. Most exhibited in the Mistake Room, the non-profit exhibition space founded by García-Alvarez. His original idea was to help Desert X artists work with community organizations in Palm Springs and other cities in Coachella Valley, but Covid-19 security protocols have also largely blurred those plans.

Yet most works of art are rooted in a certain sense of place. “The desert is not a void,” he said. “So you will see the artists here responding not only to the physical landscape but also to environmental and social issues, whether it is Felipe Baeza’s fresco on the history of undocumented migrants and queer communities of color in the desert. or the installation by Serge Attukwei Clottey dealing with the problems of access to water or the advertising panels by Xaviera Simmons on how the desert perpetuates notions of whiteness.

The works of Baeza, Murillo and Christopher Myers are due to be released to the public for various reasons after the show officially opens, while plans for a fleeting “smoke sculpture” by Judy Chicago are uncertain. (Since the Living Desert pulled out of her meeting place, she looked for a new location and said on Friday, “We couldn’t find one.”) Among the artwork already installed , here are five worth seeing.

‘Never Forget’ by Nicholas Galanin

Nodding to the history of terrorism against Native Americans more than 9/11, Galanin’s “Never Forget” turns standard recognition of Indigenous land rights into a monumental admission of wrongdoing. Close to the Palm Springs Visitor Center and the Aerial Tramway, long considered the gateway to the city, Galanin’s message is significant: a 44-foot-high sign that says “Indian Land” in letters white signs resembling the Hollywood sign, which spelled Hollywoodland when it was first erected in 1923. “The original Hollywoodland sign was an advertisement for a real estate development for the purchase of land reserved for whites,” said Galanin , a Tlingit and Unangax artist who lives in Sitka, Alaska. “This work is essentially the opposite: a call to landowners and others to invite them to join the land return movement.” He identified a piece of land near the sign that is for sale and started a GoFundMe campaign to try to buy it and return it to the Cahuilla people.

Kim Stringfellow’s ‘Jackrabbit Homestead’

The only Desert X artist who lives in the area, Stringfellow dug deep for her project in the history of the California farm and the legacy of the Small Tract Act of 1938, which allowed people to acquire up to five acres in the desert very cheaply by adding a small structure. Stringfellow has photographed the remains of these “hare farms” before and this time recreated, or more reimagined, one that belonged to Catherine Venn, a transplant from Los Angeles who settled in the wilderness in the 1940s and wrote about his adventures living among his cacti and coyote neighbors. The tiny cabin has no plumbing but a few comforts: a small bed, a kitchenette, and a table with a Smith-Corona typewriter, containing an unfinished poem about the ‘thundering silence’ of the desert that made me wonder if the artist herself had written it. (She didn’t; it’s from Venn.) An audio track of Stringfellow’s reading of Venn’s diary adds to the artist’s confusion with the subject in an interesting way. There is also a suggestion of time travel, although the direction is not entirely clear. Does the artist hand over the family property to us or does she hand it over to us?

This pair of yellow-orange cubes is far reminiscent of a fan favorite from the last Desert X: Sterling Ruby’s bright orange rectangular prism set on the desert terrain. But it was a smooth geometric shape appearing incongruously and improbably in the rugged landscape (much like the unidentified monolith found last year in Utah that inspired a thousand conspiracy theories), while the humble choice of Clottey’s material talks about droughts and looming water supply problems. Southern California as well as his native Ghana. He cuts pieces of plastic from so-called Kufuor gallons, colorful containers used in Ghana to store water, and puts them together with wire. He has used this material in the past to make everything from flags to a yellow brick road. Here, the square shapes, planted in the grass outside a Palm Springs community center, evoke water reservoirs, and the plastic blanket below spills out like much-needed water.

‘The Passenger’ by Eduardo Sarabia

Anyone traveling to Mexico for any length of time is sure to stumble upon petates: the floor mats or sleeping mats traditionally woven from dried strips of palm fronds. In this installation, 350 hand-made mats – raised from their usual use – form the walls of an open, triangular, through-roof structure in the shape of a mazel. Sarabia’s trajectory begins with her birth in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrant parents and, as an adult, her choice to move to Mexico. In the same vein, its labyrinth makes you overtake to reach the center of the triangle – a meditative glade where you can reflect on your own trip or just enjoy the views, mountains in all directions.

Vivian Suter’s ‘Tamanrasset’

Swiss-Argentinian artist who lives in Guatemala in a former coffee plantation, Suter was unable to catch a plane for a site visit. Instead, she worked from photographs of local buildings, landscapes, sunsets and more, tapping into their color palette to create a new suite of abstract paintings. Now hung behind the glass facade of a mid-century building in downtown Palm Springs, the paintings feature lemon, lime, and cherry colors and shapes like clusters of bubbles that have a vaguely look. mid-century modern. But works are never fussy or design thanks to Suter’s process – painting on raw, unstretched canvas on the exterior of her home and letting the outdoors into her work in the form of spots of dirt or crumpled leaves. stuck to the surface. Her dog’s muddy footprints also make a friendly appearance.