At the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the spectacle extends past the sonic booms of the stages. This year’s programming, curated by Raffi Lehrer in collaboration with Paul Clemente, transforms the Empire Polo Fields into a sensorial playground where light, form, and movement reshape how festivalgoers engage with the space itself. At a pivotal time in culture and the worlds well being. The pieces presented by Public Art Company, cultivate a vibe of safety, benevolence, and comfort along with the luminosity, transparency, and monumentality, inviting audiences not just to look, but to wander, rest, and feel what it’s like when the art is  another festival going friend.

As soon as you pass all the check ins and enter the Polo Field you are greeted by Starry Eyes by Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas. Like a surreal plume of cactus field that have become its own magical fortress. Inspired by the sacred geometry of golden barrel cacti, the structure juts up tilting skyward, some reaching nearly 40 feet. Festival goers enter through their bases into chambers filled with deep tone color, while star-shaped openings above frame slices of the sky like a surrealist pizza. The work embraces the desert heritage of John Lautner’s iconic modernism, blending architecture and nature into a unified visual language. As the evening sets, the structures glow like Chinese lanterns, echoing the constellations overhead and reinforcing the festival’s collective, almost cosmic energy, its scale comforting, grand, and sublime.

At the heart of the field is Maze, a glowing labyrinth by Sabine Marcelis. Composed of inflated, PVC arcs that curve and echo the natural contours of the Coachella Valley, the structure shifts in hue from pale yellow to deep red. By day, it acts as both shade and sanctuary and a perfect photo opp as light bounces off of the structure building an intentionally well composed wall of rich color. A major perk is its design which also functions in filtering sound and carving out a chill zone within the festival’s chaos. By night, it becomes an illuminated spaceship with radiating warm corridors, its inner walls a sanctuary and buffered womb that offers a rest before the desert floor. Key Marcelis’ signatures are explored with the light as a tangible material, turning the act of wandering into something meditative and immersive.