Building Coachella's Giant Art

Over the weekend, there’s a good chance your social media feeds were flooded with photos and video from Coachella.

Over the past two decades, the music festival has become a kind of unavoidable cultural juggernaut, famously spawning not just scores of imitators, but also an entire season on the fashion calendar.

This year, the monster name performances are almost secondary to stars’ semi-sanctioned offstage pursuits, like Donald Glover’s release of a new film, and Kanye West’s planned Easter morning “Sunday Service.”

Still, Coachella’s full name is the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for a reason: Visual art has, from the beginning, been a major part of the event.

Like so much about the festival, mostly what’s changed is the scale.

“We’re designing these pieces so hopefully they’re having an impact on you, even peripherally, from sometimes as much as a quarter of a mile away,” Paul Clemente, the festival’s art director, told me late last week. “As the Coachella venue has been growing over the years, the art has had to grow with it.”

Four years ago, he said, his team started fabricating the installation pieces on-site, starting about six months ahead of time, which left only final assembly for the days leading up to the festival.

That, he said, has allowed them to build bigger.

And as soon as this year’s festival is over, the team will start looking for pieces for next year.

Clemente started working for Goldenvoice, which puts on the festival, in 2007, after more than 15 years working in film visual effects, including on “The Matrix.”

He said taking on a role with the festival was a natural transition since both gigs involved using a variety of tools and media to make pieces that are specific to one site and one context.

Though some of the Coachella installations will eventually become permanent public art pieces in desert communities, Clemente said most of the pieces will be displayed only once.

The rise of Instagram, he said, has added another layer to that calculation.

“These are fleeting moments, here: To experience these shows and this art on this scale, you have to be here at Coachella,” Clemente said. “And people want to take away those images.”

Andrew Kovacs, who heads Office Kovacs, designed this year’s Colossal Cacti installation, a collection of boxy, candy-colored cactuses that stand as tall as 52 feet. He said Coachella was a unique opportunity to expose festivalgoers to architecture and design concepts they might not otherwise think much about.

“You don’t have to bring people to architecture, you can bring architecture to people,” he said.

Kovacs said his office’s piece was meant to be a fun, desert-inspired Instagram backdrop, but it also references constructivism and Ricardo Legorreta.

For Sofia Enriquez, a painter and clothing designer who was born and raised in the Coachella Valley, designing a piece for the festival was a chance to add a new skill to her repertoire: large-scale installations.

“They taught me how to weld,” she said.

Enriquez started visiting the Coachella Art Studios at the festival in high school.

Now 26, she said the experience helped her understand how to seek out resources and how to physically build a massive, 3D sculpture. And Clemente said Enriquez’s work added a welcome local perspective to the festival’s art program.

Enriquez’s piece, “Mismo,” is a garden of six wooden paisleys, each with its own color scheme and lighting.

She said the idea was to choose a shape that cuts across cultures, ages and socioeconomic groups — from farmworkers’ bandannas to silk ties, from things her grandmother stitches to the slinky tops young women wear to the fest.

“In this community out here, it’s interesting because there’s a lot of really wealthy people, and there are a lot of families that are struggling — I grew up cleaning houses,” Enriquez said. But she said she’s come to believe that people share more similarities than they might realize. And that’s what she tries to draw out in her work.

“I try to see the equality in people.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.