The commissions introduced works that rippled in the wind, bloomed with light, and dissolved into shifting color—sculptures that hovered between presence and disappearance

For the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival 2025, Public Art Company (PAC) curated an art program where nothing stayed still. Curated by PAC’s Raffi Lehrer in collaboration with Goldenvoice Art Director Paul Clemente, the program brought together artists whose work explored movement, illusion, and impermanence, turning the festival landscape into a living, breathing experience.

The 2025 Art Program traced an arc between weightlessness and gravity, illusion and presence, the mechanical and the organic. Each installation unfolded across the festival’s expanse, engaging the body, the desert light, and the shifting rhythms of the day.

Take Flight by Isabel + Helen reimagined wind-generated movement in a 60-foot kinetic sculpture. It embodied a spirit of inventorship and adventure, responding to the environment and winds of the Coachella Valley. Motorized turbines spun rhythmically, creating a mesmerizing interplay of motion and light. By day, the structure offered a serene presence; a complex structure of simple yet hypnotic motion, by night, it transformed into luminous psychedelic patterns, reflecting the desert’s ever-changing energy.

In Le Grand Bouquet, Uchronia imagined a landscape where flowers did not wilt, and nostalgia bloomed anew. A constellation of luminous, inflatable flowers stretched toward the sky, each softly glowing against the desert backdrop. As day turned to night, Le Grand Bouquet oscillated between two states—a surreal garden bathed in sun and an illuminated mirage that hovered just at the edge of reality. Beneath its oversized petals, festivalgoers found spaces of gathering, shade, and reverie, as though caught in a fleeting, dreamlike springtime.

Taffy by Stephanie Lin dissolved architecture into atmosphere. Seven towering cylinders, veiled in scalloped mesh, rose and rippled with the wind, their translucent surfaces creating shifting moiré patterns that flickered in and out of visibility. Taffy existed at the intersection of materiality and impermanence—solid but transparent, rigid but soft, ephemeral yet monumental. Its colors, drawn from midcentury desert modernism, mutated with the changing light, fading and intensifying as the sun moved across the sky. Beneath them, curved benches offered festivalgoers a place to slow down, as though sitting inside a mirage.

"Art at Coachella exists in an environment of extremes - light and shadow, movement and stillness, the fleeting and the monumental," said Raffi Lehrer, founder of Public Art Company and Curatorial Advisor for Coachella's art program. "These installations were in dialogue with the desert itself, amplifying its rhythms, its mirages, and its fleeting moments. Each work offered a different proposition: a machine that never quite flew, a flower that never quite wilted, a building that never quite stood still. This was an art program that asked us not just to look, but to inhabit, activate, and embrace the beautiful opera of the festival experience."

Public Art Company's approach to curating Coachella’s art program continued to push the boundaries of how large-scale installations functioned within the festival landscape. 

These works offered new perspectives on space, participation, and shared imagination, ensuring that the Coachella art experience remained as transformative as the music itself.