The design firm presents a series of installations and sculptures that bring colour and movement to the festival’s arid landscape
Photography by Lance Gerber featuring Taffy by Stephanie Lin
From inflatable flowers to a 60-foot kinetic sculpture to towering cylinders veiled in scalloped mesh, this year’s art lineup for the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, promises to turn heads and draw the crowds, as much as its musical headliners.
Chosen by creative agency the Public Art Company (PAC), alongside the festival’s curator and founder of PAC Raffi Lehrer in collaboration with Goldenvoice art director Paul Clemente, the dynamic installations bring colour and movement to the festival’s arid landscape.
While Coachella has been an arts and music festival since its inception in 1999, the Art Program reached its current multi-disciplinary form in 2016, when the team brought most of the production of the works in-house and on-site.
Photography by Clémentine Bricard featuring Uchronia’s Le Grand Bouquet
Under Paul Clemente’s leadership, along with a crew of talented local carpenters, metalworkers, painters and riggers, this approach to fabrication has allowed the Art Program to achieve the architectural scale that the programme has become known for the past 7 cycles.
For the 2025 edition, Coachella has unveiled three separate installations in collaboration with three international creative studios. The artists and designers were invited to create site-specific pieces exploring notions of movement, illusion and impermanence.
‘Art at Coachella exists in an environment of extremes – light and shadow, movement and stillness, the fleeting and the monumental,’ writes Raffi Lehrer, founder of Public Art Company and curatorial advisor for Coachella’s Art Program.
Photography by Lance Gerber featuring Take Flight by Isabel + Helen
‘These installations are in dialogue with the desert itself, amplifying its rhythms, its mirages and its fleeting moments,’ he continues. ‘Each work offers a different proposition: a machine that never quite flies, a flower that never quite wilts, a building that never quite stands still.’
For Take Flight by Isabel + Helen, the London-based 3D design studio reimagined wind generated movement in a 60-foot kinetic sculpture. Its motorised turbines spin rhythmically to create seamless psychedelic patterns and geometric shapes, which are supposed to reflect the desert’s changing energy.
Le Grand Bouquet, gigantic, inflatable flowers by Paris multidisciplinary collective Uchronia, features oversized petals that provide festivalgoers with much-needed shade during the hot daytime hours. Come night, the flowers softly glow against the desert backdrop and provide subtle illumination and spaces to gather.
Photography by Lance Gerber featuring Taffy by Stephanie Lin
This concept is also reflected in Stephanie Lin’s Taffy. Seven towering cylinders, veiled in scalloped mesh and coloured in beautiful pastel shades, provide a place to slow down and relax with a set of curved benches. The soft hues subtly reference the surrounding landscape, drawing from midcentury desert modernism and transforming with the changing light.
‘We see our role as curators as mirroring the multi-genre spirit of Coachella itself – just as the music curation spans an eclectic mix of styles, we aim to represent a diverse range of artistic practices,’ says Lehrer of the Art Program’s selection process and how the curators are committed to creating landmarks that foster a sense of place.
‘From sculptors to digital artists, from experimental designers to architects, they push the boundaries of spatial experience,’ continues Lehrer. ‘By blending disciplines, we ensure that the festival’s Art Program remains dynamic, forward-thinking and uniquely Coachella.’
Photography by Lance Gerber featuring Taffy by Stephanie Lin
Lehrer and Clemente develop the installations over 2-3 years, collaborating closely with artists and designers, whose bold, confident styles – and understanding of scale and elevation – promise to evoke emotional responses.
What’s more, material reuse is prioritised and a crucial part of the design process. The team cut down and reworked elements from past installations into future projects. Furthermore, the pair increasingly explores modular and demountable designs to extend the life of the work beyond the festival, for instance, as public art in local communities.
‘One of our all-time favourite installations we’ve worked on was Sarbalé ke by Francis Kere,’ notes Lehrer. ‘It had all the hallmarks of an impactful installation we strive to fulfil – a pavilion that provides a place of respite and shade. It now lives permanently in a park in a slightly reduced form in the City of Indio, a mere stone’s throw from the festival grounds.’
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