Desert X was founded in 2017 by Susan Davis, a Palm Springs–based arts patron and former gallerist, who incorporated the organising non-profit (The Desert Biennial) and recruited the British curator Neville Wakefield — previously senior curator at MoMA PS1 and curator of the Elevation 1049 site-specific programme in Gstaad — as founding artistic director. The institutional premise was specific. The Coachella Valley, the desert basin east of Los Angeles that runs from Palm Springs in the north-west to the Salton Sea in the south-east, had since the mid-twentieth century been a cultural and architectural reference point — the modernist desert architecture of Albert Frey, William F Cody, E Stewart Williams and the Palm Springs school; the bohemian and Hollywood retreat economy; the Cahuilla and Agua Caliente Indigenous presence; the agricultural infrastructure of the Coachella Valley aquifer; the Salton Sea ecological collapse. What it did not have was a international contemporary art exhibition that took the landscape itself, rather than a museum building within it, as its site.
The 1st Desert X (25 February – 30 April 2017), curated by Wakefield, established the model the biennial has held to across its subsequent four editions. Sixteen commissioned works dispersed across the valley floor — Doug Aitken's Mirage on a hillside in Palm Springs; Phillip K Smith III's The Circle of Land and Sky; Sterling Ruby's SPECTER, a fluorescent orange monolith placed in the desert at Rancho Mirage; Richard Prince's untitled appropriation; Jennifer Bolande's Visible Distance / Second Sight, billboards reproducing the mountain horizon they sat in front of — were sited at points that ranged from accessible roadside locations to remote hike-in positions. Admission was free. The biennial provided GPS coordinates rather than a visitor centre. The visitor experience the curatorial frame was designed to produce — driving the valley with a map of the works, navigating the route oneself, encountering each commission within its own desert site rather than as part of a curatorial sequence — was closer to a Land Art reconnaissance than to a conventional biennial visit, and the model was new at biennial scale.
The curatorial frame the 1st edition established was legible against an art-historical lineage that Desert X has continued to engage. The American desert had been the site of the founding generation of Land Art — Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969–70) in the Nevada desert; Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) at the Great Salt Lake; Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico; Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1976) in the Utah desert; James Turrell's continuing Roden Crater project at a volcanic cone in northern Arizona — and the Land Art generation had established the desert as a contemporary art site through the logistical and curatorial work of the Dia Art Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a small number of committed private patrons. Desert X's institutional position has been to bring that long Land Art tradition into the contemporary biennial form: a roughly two-year cadence, a publicly-announced curatorial frame, a international roster of commissioned artists, a free admission policy, and a public-engagement programme of talks, tours, and educational work alongside the commissions themselves.
The five Coachella Valley editions to date — 2017 (curated by Wakefield), 2019 (Wakefield with co-curators Matthew Schum and Amanda Hunt; titled simply Desert X 2019), 2021 (Wakefield with co-curator César García-Alvarez), 2023 (Wakefield with co-curator Diana Campbell), and 2025 (Wakefield with co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas) — have extended the curatorial frame across an increasingly international roster of commissioned artists. The 2019 edition produced works by Cara Romero, John Gerrard, Pia Camil, Iván Argote, Mary Kelly, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Cinthia Marcelle; the 2021 edition, organised under the logistical constraints of the late-pandemic period, included Eduardo Sarabia, Felipe Baeza, Christopher Myers, Vivian Suter, Judy Chicago, and a notable Mexican-and-Latin-American generation that the co-curatorial work of García-Alvarez had brought into the frame; the 2023 edition produced major works by Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, Torkwase Dyson, Mario García Torres, Tschabalala Self, and the Indigenous Cahuilla artist Gerald Clarke whose Immersion at the Cahuilla reservation engaged the continuing Indigenous presence in the valley; the 5th edition, opened 8 March 2025, programmed new works across the eleven cities and unincorporated communities of the valley alongside the continuing partnership with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians at their cultural plaza in Palm Springs.
The curatorial argument the biennial has continued to make — that the desert landscape is not merely a scenic site for the placement of contemporary art objects but a continuing ecological, political, Indigenous, and agricultural reality that contemporary art must engage if it is to be sited there responsibly — has produced some of the most internationally-discussed individual works of the post-2017 American contemporary art conversation. Aitken's Mirage was the breakout image of the 1st edition and continues to operate as a reference point for the Instagram-era discussion of art and place. Sterling Ruby's SPECTER produced critical conversation about the mismatch between the visual rhetoric of contemporary minimalism and the Indigenous and ecological histories of the sites the minimalism was placed within. The 2019 work by Cara Romero, a Cahuilla photographer working from within rather than upon the Indigenous landscape of the valley, answered the critical question Ruby's work had raised. The continuing curatorial dialogue between international contemporary artists and local Indigenous, ecological, and political conditions is the principal content of what Desert X has continued to be.
The institutional argument Desert X has made — that a international contemporary art biennial can operate at scale on a dispersed model across a landscape rather than within a building, that admission can be free without compromising curatorial ambition, and that the engagement of site can produce new work — has held across nine years and five editions, and the model has begun to be studied by other regional biennials internationally. The continuing question, which the AlUla partnership of 2020 raised, is what happens when the institutional logic of the desert biennial is exported into a different political and cultural context.
The institutional architecture
Desert X is organised by The Desert Biennial, a California 501(c)(3) non-profit established 2015–2016 specifically to produce the biennial, with Susan Davis as president and founder and a board drawn from the Palm Springs cultural and philanthropic community. Funding has been private — individual philanthropic gifts, foundation grants, in-kind support from the Coachella Valley municipal authorities and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, and a network of regional and national contemporary art patrons. The continuing institutional partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla (2020–) is structurally distinct from the Coachella Valley operation, and is discussed in the section that follows.
