coachella 2025 art installations embrace movement, illusion, and the ephemeral

vibrant artworks scattered across festival grounds

Playful and monumental, the works of art across Coachella 2025 are not standing still, literally or conceptually. As festivalgoers descend once more on Southern Caliornia‘s Colorado Desert, they’re greeted not only by sonic booms from the main stage but by a chorus of kinetic sculptures, light-blooming inflatables, and temporary works of architecture that sway, ripple, and all but vanish in the shifting sun.

This year’s installations, curated by Public Art Company (PAC) in collaboration with longtime Goldenvoice Art Director Paul Clemente, present a high-stakes pas de deux with the elements. In the words of PAC founder Raffi Lehrer, ‘This is an art program that asks us not just to look, but to inhabit, activate, and embrace the beautiful opera of the festival experience.’

Coachella 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

blooming inflatables to ephemeral clouds for coachella 2025

A standout art installation at Coachella 2025 is Taffy by Stephanie Lin, a mesmerizing work which continues to blur the line between sculpture and environment. Seven cylindrical towers cloaked in scalloped mesh flutter and ripple in the wind, creating flickering moiré patterns that appear and disappear with each gust. Painted in hues borrowed from midcentury desert modernism, the structures shimmer with the day’s changing light — monuments not of permanence, but of becoming. Beneath them, curved benches invite visitors to pause, reflect, and dissolve, just for a moment, into the mirage.

Meanwhile, Isabel + Helen Studio‘s Take Flight is inspired by the elegant impracticality of 19th-century flying machines, the installation features giant turbines that catch the desert wind and spin hypnotically, seemingly hovering between motion and stillness. Two skeletal bicycles roam the festival grounds, channeling the madcap ambition of human-powered aviation. By day, Take Flight reads as a mechanical relic lost in time; by night, it becomes a glowing, ghostly turbine—a reminder that sometimes the beauty lies not in success, but in the audacity of the attempt.

Le Grand Bouquet by Uchronia is a surreal garden of inflatable flowers that glow from within. Towering and translucent, these blossoms stretch skyward, their oversized petals providing shade and wonder. As the desert light shifts, the work transforms from radiant sculpture to floating mirage, toeing the line between reality and reverie. Beneath the flowers, festivalgoers can lounge in ephemeral springtime, gathered in pockets of soft nostalgia and shared spectacle.

Taffy, Stephanie Lin, Coachella, 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

art that invites touch, movement, and inhabitance

The art installations across the grounds at Coachella 2025 are assembled on-site. Since 2016, Clemente and a skilled in-house team of builders — carpenters, painters, riggers — have brought large-scale commissions to life from the ground up, embracing architectural scale and structural integrity without losing playfulness. From the curator‘s perspective, Lehrer’s vision draws from artists with ‘an intuitive understanding of scale and elevations’ who can evoke emotion through material, form, and color. Many of these collaborators come from architecture and design backgrounds, chosen as much for their technical fluency as for their spatial imagination.

The works do not shy away from interactivity. Many of the installations — architectural in ambition, sculptural in feel — invite touch, movement, and inhabitance. Some twist in the wind, some glow from within, others transform from day to night. What unites them is an attunement to Coachella’s extremes: blinding light and deep shadow, crowds and solitude, the monumental and the fleeting. Every piece is site-specific and tailored for the festival’s unique demands, often requiring up to three years of development in close collaboration with the curators.

Take Flight, Isabel + Helen Studio, Coachella, 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

The team notes that these installations face the same environmental trials as any desert structure — sun, wind, sand — but PAC is taking the challenge one step further with an evolving sustainability ethos. ‘We’re increasingly exploring modular and demountable strategies,’ says Lehrer, ‘so works can live on elsewhere.’ In some cases, like Francis Kéré’s Sarbalé ke, installations find new homes as permanent public art. When relocation isn’t possible, parts are repurposed, structural elements salvaged, and materials recycled — design decisions that begin not at teardown, but at first sketch.

The artworks might be up against sound systems, but they holds their own through scale and sensation. Lehrer describes the curatorial approach as mirroring the music festival’s genre-fluid spirit—pairing sculptors with architects, digital artists with experimental designers. It’s this multiplicity that gives the art program its vitality. Each piece becomes a punctuation mark in the sprawling sentence of Coachella’s landscape — an invitation to pause, reflect, and maybe even spin in the wind.

Uchronia, Le Grand Bouquet, Coachella, 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Take Flight, Isabel + Helen Studio, Coachella, 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

Uchronia, Le Grand Bouquet, Coachella, 2025 | image © Lance Gerber

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Le Grand Bouquet, photo by Clémentine Bricard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

project info:

event: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Art Program

artists: Stephanie Lin, Isabel + Helen Studio, Uchronia

curation: Public Art Company (PAC)

dates: April 11th — 13th and 18th — 20th, 2025

photography: © Lance Gerber | @lance.gerber