Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held between April 15-17, 2016 and April 22-24, 2016 on the Palm Desert East of Los Angeles. The event plays host many genres of music, including rock, indie, hip hop, and electronic dance music, as well as art installations and sculptures. Art plays a pivotal role in defining the Coachella experience. Each year Coachella features art from artists worldwide. 

Coachella presents several real-time events as well as music and artistic sculptures including food & beverages, on-site camping, off-site camping, competitions and sustainability and charity activities. Even though the main focus is of course the music, with dozens of acts performing, from reunited crowd-pleasers like Guns N’ Roses and LCD Soundsystem, to contemporary artistic installations are the most funny part of Coachella. Coachella's installations turn into an art game throughout the festival designed by well known artists from all around.

Paul Clemente, the art director of the Coachella, said ''What we're really trying to do is outdo ourselves from the previous year.”

“This year, we went in a bit of a different direction. We'd been using a group of artists for a handful of years, commissioning new work from them. We love all of those artists and we did a lot of great projects, but we wanted to try and look for some new ideas and to do that we went outside of our normal circle of artists, and outside this part of the country'' Clemente added.

For this year, Clemente and his team changed the selection process. Each year, Clemente and his colleagues were accepting proposals from approximately 250 artists and picking only six or seven projects among them. But, this year Clemente's team made a shortlist including 15-16 artists from different countires, which created more selective pool according to the previous years.

This year, the festival was also responsible for the fabrication of designs at the event, produced by local companies Rice Construction and White’s Steel. The artists had only 11 days to produce their own installations via these construction companies. “What were doing here is very similar to that world, in that we are building something for the first and only time, using a variety of different materials and processes, and having to do it safely'' added Clemente. 

Take a closer look the installations taking part in this year's Coachella: 

Tower of Twelve Stories at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Jimenez Lai / Bureau Spectacular

The Tower of Twelve Stories is essentially a full-scale section model, a 52-foot-tall structure peeled open from top to bottom to expose the interior action. Its modules come together not in exacting cubes, but rather in cartoonish spaces of different shapes, some barely touching and others snug in place. 

The installation responds to Rem Koolhaas’ notion of the “typical plan,” or generic sameness, of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, a wholly American architectural archetype that presumably adapts to any kind of business that occupies it. Lai offers a more animated vision: a cartoonish metropolis of tiny bubble-like spaces populated by eccentric characters. The title of his four-story structure traces to the Leonard Cohen classic “Tower of Song,” whose lyrics refer to observations — “coughing all night,” “they don’t let a woman kill you,” “you hear these funny voices” — in the “tower of song.”

Tower of Twelve Stories at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Jimenez Lai / Bureau Spectacular. Image © Goldenvoice.

Armpit art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Katrina Neiburga and Andris Englitis / Armpit. Image © Goldenvoice.

Beyond its spaceship-like entrance, the multimedia ARMPIT has eight distinctive spaces inspired by every man who eludes his family under the guise of fixing the car or working a project, when they’re usually tinkering and indulging in their hobbies.

The artists constructed ARMPIT largely with discarded materials from houses and office buildings in Latvia, taking advantage of their historical patina and social history. They gutted an old washing machine to fashion a futuristic lampshade from its shiny metal ring, and built the outer walls of the Rotating Computer Head, one of the eight spaces, with the doors of file cabinets from a Latvian tax office. Two people at a time sit for two minutes on the repurposed car seats in this module, which gently turns on a military tank turret ring. Here the viewer experiences a catharsis, where a boys’ choir enters into a dialog with a men’s choir, symbolizing the developmental continuity of male creativity from childhood to adulthood.

Sneaking Into The Snow art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez. Image courtesy of Coachella Festival.

Often feeling like outsiders in their own hometown, Coachella-based artists Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, who collaborate as The Date Farmers, have titled their installation Sneaking Into the Show. For the artists — whose paintings, constructions, and installations reflect the lives and traditions of the area’s Mexican farmworker community — the title suggests the only way most of their neighbors could ever experience the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. To a certain degree, they also feel like party crashers. And they hope the title will show the audience a small slice of the life only a few miles from the perfectly manicured festival grounds.

Raices Cultura art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Raices Cultura / http://www.raicesdelvalle.org/. Image courtesy of Coachella Festival.

Raices Cultura is a non profit that was founded by an energetic and dynamic young group of community leaders in 2004. Our mission is to create spaces for artistic and cultural expression, promote healthy communities, and strengthen the voice of the Eastern Coachella Valley.

Katrina Chairs art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Alexandre Arrechea /  Alexandre Arrechea. Image courtesy of Alexandre Arrechea.

With Katrina Chairs, on the other hand, Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea imagines a bigger, more significant purpose: to elevate an entire community.

Like many of Arrechea’s sculpture and installation works, Katrina Chairs began with a watercolor painting, A Few Days Before Katrina (Diálogo). Practical and immediate, watercolor is the artist’s primary medium. He cherishes the watercolor as the only part of his process that he shares with no other hands. His “Katrina” series includes the watercolors Levitate, Aire Húmedo, and Dialog II, each depicting the theme he realizes in Katrina Chairs. The titles refer to the hurricane in 2005 that slammed the U.S. Gulf Coast with winds of up to 127 miles per hour. Its flooding caused the breaching of some levees in New Orleans, leaving parts of the city under water and uninhabitable.

Portals  art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Phillip K. Smith III / http://pks3.com/.  Image © Goldenvoice.

It was a tough act to follow yet Smith — born in Los Angeles and raised in the festival city of Indio, California — built a monolithic installation at the 2014 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Reflection Field, consisting of a two-story-tall mirrored rectangle and four smaller mirrored squares, reflected the movement of people in the desert environment in daylight and then drenched the night in bright progressing colors powered by LEDs.

Fascinated and inspired by the desert’s phenomenal light, Smith advances the work of California’s Light and Space pioneers of the late 1960s and ’70s, particularly James Turrell and Robert Irwin. The idea of interacting with light and the sun traces to Smith’s earliest works after studying art and architecture at Rhode Island School of Design.

Besame Mucho art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by RR Studios. Image courtesy of RR Studios.

For artists Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt, who work collaboratively as R & R Studios in Miami, the 130-foot-long-by-28-foot-tall installation Bésame Mucho is a timely gesture for California. Always relating their larger-than-life-sized art to the places where they install it, the artists associate California with freedom. Inspired by L.A.’s iconic Hollywood sign, they created Bésame Mucho in the universal language of flower power — 100,000 silk flowers in a prevailing warm tone of reds, yellows, and oranges.

Do Lab art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Do Lab / Do Lab. Image courtesy of Do Lab.

World-renowned, Los Angeles based event producers, Do LaB, are pioneers in America’s festival culture and the masterminds behind Coachella’s wettest and wildest oasis, the Do Lab Stage. Aside from bringing cutting edge lineups, beautiful art installations and feel good vibes to the polo fields every year, Do LaB is best known for producing their own set of unique, interactive music festivals including Lightning in a Bottle, Woogie Weekend and Dirtybird Campout.

Top Image Tower of Twelve Stories at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA by Jimenez Lai / Bureau Spectacular. Image © Bureau Spectacular.

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