I always went to Coachella during the day. I left when the headliner started near midnight because I was there to get lost in the art. To watch it change from the early morning, as the spectacular light shifted in the afternoon and created a stunning crescendo in the evening. It was always about the art for me. Fear of crowds and sensitivity to noise made it a sensory overload.
Coachella is turning 25. In its quarter century, the festival has become something larger than any single headliner or headline moment. The momentum now belongs equally to the artists who claim the polo grounds as their canvas, the wild imaginations that activate this land every April and dare the desert to contain them. The 2026 art program was curated by Raffi Lehrer of Public Art Company in collaboration with Goldenvoice Art Director Paul Clemente. Together, they have built something serious on these grounds. Not decoration. Not backdrop. A program that treats the desert as what it actually is, one of the most compelling sites for large-scale art in the world.
I understand, on a cellular level, why artists want to make work here. The light alone is an argument. It arrives differently every hour, flattening objects at noon and electrifying them at dusk. By evening, the San Jacintos turn violet, and the sky does something no photograph has ever fully captured. Art blooms from the desert flora and fauna, the way the ocotillo blooms after rain. It does not need permission. It simply finds its form in the landscape and opens. The Coachella Valley earns everything placed inside it.
People talk about Coachella as a music festival. That has always been a partial description. The polo grounds in Indio are an exquisite tabula rasa, a playground of the imagination, and an extraordinary opportunity for art to interact with the people who move through it. The stages are one reason to be there. The installations are another, and for a growing number of people who make the pilgrimage to the Empire Polo Club every April, they are the reason. You can stream the performances. You cannot stream standing inside Sabine Marcelis’s glowing inflatable maze at midnight with the mountains on the horizon and the bass from the main stage reaching you like a rumor.
Every April, more than 100,000 people arrive on these grounds. This year, Justin Bieber broke every record the festival had left to break. Highest-paid headliner in its history. $5.04 million in SKYLRK merchandise moved in a single weekend, more than any artist has sold across both weekends combined. The most Googled performance on record. The headlines wrote themselves. But the polo grounds were already extraordinary before the first note played. Public Art Company had been building that for months, as they have for over a decade, commissioning large-scale site-specific work designed for this land, this light, and these bodies moving through desert heat. Walk far enough from the stages and the art takes over completely. That walk is worth taking.
Maze — Sabine Marcelis
“A maze of soft, inflated, gently curving stacked arcs. Its curved PVC forms in varying heights were inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley. They meet the eye like a desert mirage, shifting in color from pale yellow to deep red at the core. The result is a gradient terrain of gentle volumes that filter the festival’s sound and provide shade from the daytime sun. The forms encourage visitors to enter and meander, where they can encounter both nooks for rest and clearings for glimpses of the stages. At night, the piece becomes an illuminated oasis; the inflated structures gently glow, turning the maze into a warm, radiant landscape.”
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber, Network
Operations — Dedo Vabo (Derek Doublin and Vanessa Bonet)
“A three-story command center where the festival’s fictional communications grid hums and spirals wonderfully out of control. Rebuilt from scavenged components, the tower feels both improvised and industrial, its radio towers and satellite dishes jutting skyward like an overgrown broadcast organism.” Dedo Vabo has brought their Hippo Empire to Coachella four times now. It gets more accurate every year.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Starry Eyes — Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas
“Designed by London-based architect Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas, the structures soar almost 40 feet tall, their pleated-fabric-covered steel ribs tilting like cactuses seeking the sun. Openings at their crowns, star-shaped oculi, frame the sky, echoing the central social space of John Lautner’s iconic Bob Hope House in Palm Springs. By day, Starry Eyes provides shade and respite, a place to lie back on the grass and gaze upward through patterned light and shadow.”
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Visage Brut — The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG)
“A vertical totem of modular steel forms, merging industrial fabrication with anthropomorphic expression.” Andrew Holder and Claus Benjamin Freyinger of the LADG planted something vertical into a landscape that insists on being horizontal. At night, it glows green against the desert sky. Industrial is trying to become a face. The desert has seen stranger things and stayed standing.
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
Photograph by Lance Gerber
The desert keeps what the festival leaves behind. The performances end. The recordings exist. But the experience of being inside a work of art in this landscape, at this scale, in this light, belongs only to the people who were there. That is the part of Coachella that cannot be replicated, streamed, or summarized. It has to be felt. The valley has been offering that long before any of us arrived. At 25, the identity is clear. This was always an art festival that also hosted one of the world’s most popular music programs. The Instagrammable eye candy, the pilgrimage to the desert for nostalgia, forgetting who we are for the weekend, and getting lost in the art. Coachella is a place and a state of mind. A dot on the map and a time capsule. Now we see it is as much about the art as it is the performances.
Coachella 2026, Empire Polo Club, Indio, California. April 10-12 and April 17-19.
All photographs courtesy of Lance Gerber, 2026