Starry Eyes by Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas. Image © Lance Gerber
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https://www.archdaily.com/1040623/coachella-2026-immersive-installations-explore-monumentality-and-light-transparency-in-the-california-desert
The 25th edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival returns to the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, from April 10 to 12 and April 17 to 19, 2026, bringing together more than 130 acts alongside an ambitious program of large-scale art installations. Presented by Public Art Company (PAC) and curated by founder Raffi Lehrer in collaboration with Goldenvoice Art Director Paul Clemente, this year’s selection explores monumentality through luminance, transparency, and lightness of form. Set within Coachella’s desert oasis, the installations invite visitors to engage physically and sensorially, responding to shifting daylight and the evolving atmosphere from sunrise to nightfall.
Coachella Music Festival 2026. Image © Lance Gerber
Among the new temporary commissions, Sabine Marcelis’s Maze appears as a landscape of inflated, curving arcs that shift in color from pale yellow to deep red, offering both shaded refuge and an immersive terrain. Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas’s Starry Eyes is a constellation of towering, cactus-inspired structures, where oculus-like openings frame the sky, transforming from cooling shelters by day into luminous lanterns by night. Meanwhile, the LADG’s Visage Brut presents a vertical totem of modular steel forms, merging industrial fabrication with anthropomorphic expression. Returning this year, Dedo Vabo’s Network Operations blends sculpture and absurdist theater. Along with the temporary pieces, six permanent installations remain embedded in the Coachella Valley, including Sarbalé Ke by Francis Kéré, alongside works by Edoardo Tresoldi, Andrew Kovacs, Kumkum Fernando, studio HANNAH, and Oana Stănescu.
Read on to learn more about the 2026 Coachella Music Festival’s three new temporary installations, with descriptions provided by the organization, revisit a returning installation, and explore the six permanent works installed across the Empire Polo Club and the surrounding Indio area.
Related Article Concéntrico 2026 Features Smiljan Radić Installation and 26 Urban Interventions in Logroño, Spain New Additions to Coachella’s Art ProgramMaze / Sabine Marcelis
Maze by Sabine Marcelis. Image © Lance Gerber
Maze by Sabine Marcelis is a maze of soft, inflated, gently curving stacked arcs. Its curved PVC forms in varying heights were inspired by the natural contours of the Coachella Valley. They meet the eye like a desert mirage, shifting in color from pale yellow to deep red at the core. The result is a gradient terrain of gentle volumes that filter the festival’s sound and provide shade from the daytime sun. The forms encourage visitors to enter and meander, where they can encounter both nooks for rest and clearings for glimpses of the stages. At night, the piece becomes an illuminated oasis; the inflated structures gently glow, turning the maze into a warm, radiant landscape.
Starry Eyes / Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas
Starry Eyes by Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas. Image © Lance Gerber
Starry Eyes by London-based architect Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas is a field of towering geometric forms inspired by the star-shaped golden barrel cactus. Nested together and tilting like cactuses seeking the sun, they alternate in size, some climbing to almost 40 feet tall. Openings to enter the cacti appear at their bottoms, where the brightly hued fabric lacing their outer ribs immerses the festivalgoer in a pool of color. The star-shaped openings at their crowns form oculi that frame the sky, inspired by John Lautner’s Bob Hope House in Palm Springs. By day, Starry Eyes provides cooling shade and respite, a tower of colorful light and shadow where one can lie back on the grass, gazing at the sky. By night, it transforms into a cluster of lanterns.
Visage Brut / The LADG
Visage Brut by the LADG. Image © Lance Gerber
Visage Brut by The Los Angeles Design Group (TheLADG), led by Andrew Holder and ClausBenjamin Freyinger, reimagines the logic and mythology of a totemic tower through the language of contemporary construction. This soaring steel monolith is a tower of modular boxes, each one folded, rolled, cut, or warped just short of losing its structural integrity. Each box is animated by a stack of subtly anthropomorphic “characters”. The result is a vertical procession of hybrid geometries that both perform the physical labor of holding up the weight above and project an uncanny, figurative presence. Visage Brut was born from an experimental collaboration with software-assisted steel fabricator Stud-IOConstruction. The piece is a continuation of LADG’s investigations into the urban form and interest in historical ideas, transforming an industrial material used in retail construction into an expressive totem.
Network Operations / Dedo Vabo
Network Operations by Dedo Vabo. Image © Lance Gerber
Returning this year is Dedo Vabo with Network Operations, a new chapter in their long-running part-sculpture-part-absurdist-theater series Hippo Empire.
Permanent InstallationsSarbalé Ke / Francis Kéré
Sarbale Ké by Francis Kéré. Image © Julian Basjel
Dr. Carreon Park, Indio
Installed: 2021
Etherea / Edoardo Tresoldi
Etherea by Edoardo Tresoldi. Image © Julian Basjel
Cesar Chavez and Sixth Streets, Coachella
Installed: 2018
Colossal Cacti / Andrew Kovacs 
Colossal Cacti by Office Kovacs. Image © Julian Basjel
Smurr Street and Miles Avenue, Indio
Installed: 2022
The Messengers / Kumkum Fernando
The Messengers by Kumkum Fernando. Image © Julian Basjel
Towne Street, Indio
Installed: 2023
Monarchs: A House in Six Parts / HANNAH
Jefferson Street, La Quinta
Installed: 2024
Monarchs: A House in Three Parts by Hannah Office. Image © Julian BasjelMutts / Oana Stănescu
Miles Avenue Park, Indio
Installed: 2022
Mutts by Oana Stănescu. Image © Julian Basjel
Check out ArchDaily’s coverage of the Coachella Valley installations from previous years: Coachella Music Festival 2025; Desert X 2025 Exhibition; Coachella Music Festival 2024; among other editions.