VIP Access.
VIP Access.
Walk a vast outdoor environment of assemblage and desert ruins where found materials, time and landscape collide to reveal a radical vision
Set within the open desert of Joshua Tree, this guided visit explores the vast outdoor environment created by Noah Purifoy, where assemblage, landscape, and time are inseparable. Walking among large-scale sculptures made from salvaged materials, visitors encounter a practice rooted in reuse, social history, and radical independence from traditional art institutions. The work unfolds slowly across the site, shaped by weather, decay, and persistence, revealing Purifoy’s belief that art could exist as a lived, evolving relationship with place. The tour offers space to reflect on how material, labor, and environment converge to form one of the most important and uncompromising artistic legacies in the American desert.
Guided visit across site-responsive works embedded in desert life, exploring experimentation, place, and art that remains where it was made.
This guided tour offers an immersive introduction to High Desert Test Sites, a pioneering platform for site-responsive art rooted in the landscapes and communities of the Mojave Desert. Visitors move through works created to exist outside traditional gallery contexts, encountering projects that engage land, architecture, time, and daily life as integral elements of the artwork. Rather than presenting finished objects, the tour reveals art as process, experiment, and long-term relationship with place. Through stories of past and ongoing projects, participants gain insight into how artists work within the desert’s physical and social conditions, challenging ideas of ownership, permanence, and institutional display while foregrounding collaboration, care, and attention to context.
Lunch and tour of Institute of Mentalphysics
Friday, Mar 27 from 1 pm to 2:30 pm
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Guided visit to a historic desert campus exploring sound, vibration, architecture, and metaphysical inquiry rooted in place.
Set within a historic desert campus devoted to metaphysical study, this visit combines shared time and guided exploration of the Institute of Mentalphysics’ architecture, philosophy, and grounds. Participants are introduced to a place where sound, vibration, and landscape have long been used as tools for inner inquiry and collective reflection. The tour traces the Institute’s unique role in the cultural and spiritual history of the high desert, offering insight into how ideas of consciousness, healing, and resonance shaped its buildings and continue to inform contemporary gatherings. The experience invites a slower pace, encouraging conversation, contemplation, and a deeper awareness of how belief systems, environment, and community intersect in this singular desert setting.
Encounter carved wooden figures drawn from desert trees, revealing an intuitive practice of excavation where form, matter, and landscape con
An immersive visit into Ryan Schneider’s desert studio, where fallen trees become towering, hand-carved sculptures shaped through intuition and physical labor. Working directly into wood gathered from his Joshua Tree surroundings, Schneider releases forms that feel ancient, ceremonial, and alive, revealing a practice rooted in excavation rather than construction.
A guided walk through sculptural desert cabins where architecture, absence, and landscape merge, revealing a quiet meditation on shelter.
This guided tour explores Jerry Sohn’s Ghost Cabins, a series of sculptural structures set within the desert that hover between architecture and artwork. Neither fully habitable nor purely symbolic, the cabins function as traces of shelter, evoking presence through absence. As visitors move through the site, the works reveal a sensitivity to proportion, light, and negative space, using the desert as an active collaborator rather than a backdrop. The tour invites reflection on ideas of refuge, impermanence, and the human impulse to mark land, offering a quiet, contemplative experience shaped by stillness, scale, and the slow rhythms of the high desert.
Guided walk through open desert pavilions framing light, wind, and space, exploring architecture as gesture between shelter and exposure.
This guided tour visits Jerry Sohn’s Pavilions, sculptural architectural forms that sit lightly within the desert landscape. Open, skeletal, and intentionally incomplete, the pavilions frame space rather than enclose it, inviting light, wind, and movement to become part of the experience. As visitors move through and around the structures, the work reveals an interest in balance, geometry, and the threshold between shelter and exposure. The tour offers a contemplative encounter with architecture as gesture, exploring how minimal interventions can heighten awareness of place, scale, and the quiet presence of the desert itself.