From Desert X 2021: The Wishing Well by Serge Attukwei Clottey at the James O. Jessie Desert Highland Unity Center in Palm Springs.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LANCE GERBER
Desert X, the recurring site-specific, international art exhibition, will return in 2023 to the Coachella Valley. The fourth edition will be open to the public from March 4 to May 7, 2023.
The organization, which has drawn more than 1.25 million art lovers to its three previous exhibitions in the Coachella Valley, is also adding three new board members, the co-curator for the 2023 exhibition, and an expanded executive team.
Newly appointed 2023 co-curator Diana Campbell is the founding artistic director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation in Bangladesh and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit. She is credited with its development into a leading research and exhibitions platform. Campbell, who has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, is committed to fostering a transnational art world and to amplifying the reach of indigenous voices in the art world. She is inspired by her cultural background as a member of the CHamoru diaspora from Guam.
“Desert X 2023 presents a compelling opportunity to connect communities around the globe, especially when it comes to how we survive in a world with increasingly volatile environmental conditions,” Campbell says. “For my first project of this scale in the United States, I am driven to draw translocal connections across contexts of extreme weather – from the droughts of the California desert to the floods of Bangladesh.”
New to the Desert X board are Jarvis Crawford, community center manager at the James O. Jessie Desert Highland Unity Center for the City of Palm Springs Parks & Recreation Department; Nicholas Galanin, Desert X 2021 artist; and commissioner Guillermo “Bill” Sanchez, chairman, Riverside County Planning Commission, principal of Capital Building Services in Rancho Mirage and partner at Memo Design, an architectural design firm.
Mara Gladstone, who led the public and educational programming for the exhibition in 2021, has been named to the newly created position of deputy director and head of programs. Gladstone was previously a curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Diane Mailey, who most recently was director of the Institute at the Golden Gate, a program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in San Francisco, has been named director of development. Gladstone and Mailey join an artistic director Neville Wakefield and executive director Jenny Gil.
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