Drive east from Los Angeles for an hour or so and you’ll reach the Coachella Valley, the western fringe of the Colorado Desert, itself a branch of the Sonoran Desert that stretches into Arizona.
From the earliest days of Palm Springs the area has been a mecca for Hollywood celebrities, snowbirds and retirees. It’s home to the Coachella Music and Arts Festival and Desert X, the recently conceived installation biennial.
Desert X 23 includes highway billboards of work by Tyre Nichols, the Memphis, Tennessee photographer who died in January 2023 after a severe beating by police during a traffic stop.
The strong west winds that mark the entrance to the valley have made Coachella home to gigantic fields of electricity-generating windmills. The winds themselves create continual dust storms and cause trees and shrubs to lean to the east.
