How an Art Event in the California Desert Became a Community

Although she moved to a smaller property a few miles away in 2022, after HDTS took over stewarding A-Z West, art and life continue to overlap in Zittel’s work. Over the years, she has made portable living units, including the spaceshiplike “A-Z Wagon Stations” that dot the rocky landscape, and furniture prototypes for cooking, dining and bathing.

Zittel is by no means the first artist to retreat to this remote desert landscape, and she certainly will not be the last. In the 1970s, the famed Pop artist Ed Ruscha began amassing property here, and the sculptor Alma Allen had a home and studio in Joshua Tree decades later. The assemblage artist Noah Purifoy arrived in 1989 and soon established his outdoor museum just north of A-Z West, which remains open to visitors today.

Slowly but steadily, artists have migrated to Joshua Tree and the surrounding desert, and the recent proliferation of art events attests to its magnetism. Desert X, a biennial exhibition of art installations in the nearby Coachella Valley, is approaching its 10th anniversary in 2027, and the High Desert Art Fair completed its third installment in nearby Pioneertown in March. However, unlike these transient events, HDTS invites artists to stay a while.

“I think it leads to more thoughtful work when an artist can spend time here before they make something,” Zittel said. During its 20-year run as a sometimes annual, sometimes biennial art event, HDTS invited artists to engage deeply with the land, leading to thoughtful, site-specific works that also captured the rough-and-tumble spirit of the desert.

In an artwork called “Payphone Project” from the 2006 event, the artist Mark Klassen, who lives and works in Milwaukee, installed a solitary pay phone in a sandy desert wash near A-Z West. The lonely phone booth contained massive infrastructure — Klassen dug and laid nearly 1,000 feet of phone wire, connecting it to a twin pay phone in Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, where, Zittel said, people could talk to whoever picked up the phone in Joshua Tree.