East Valley artists taking center stage this weekend at Desert Open Studios

This weekend more than 100 local artists will open up the doors to their studios for the sixth annual Desert Open Studios, transforming private workspaces into public galleries for a three-day celebration of local creativity.

Running from Friday through Sunday, the self-guided tour features 158 artists and 69 studio spaces across all nine desert cities.

While Desert Open Studios has seen a higher concentration of participants from the West Valley — often established, late-career artists, many with the privilege of maintaining dedicated studio spaces — each year organizers try to recruit and support creators in Indio and Coachella.

Adriana Lopez-Ospina, a fiber and mixed-media artist, helped the tour target younger artists who may lack the financial resources for a studio space.

“They’re so talented, but they’re young and so they’re in the very beginning of their career where they work out of their room, they work out of the dining rooms,” she said.

To address this barrier, Lopez-Ospina teamed up with the CV Collective, a new art center in Coachella. The space will host 10 artists this weekend, providing a centralized hub for those without public-facing workspaces.

CV Collective does a little bit of everything, she said. From low-cost community workshops to punk shows.

This isn’t the first time they’re utilizing a group space in the East Valley to showcase artists. In 2022 the Coachella Valley Art Center in Indio was used for the same purpose, and last year Little Street Music Hall in Indio was the hub for many East Valley artists.

But both institutions have since shut down. The art center is still undergoing renovations and Little Street Music Hall closed last year and was replaced by the Dune Room.

One of Lopez-Ospina’s goals was to show young artists what it takes to make art a career.

“I think other industries do a really good job of showing you a pathway into making it a full career,” she said.

In a move to further professionalize the experience, Lopez-Ospina secured a grant this year to provide stipends to participating artists, ensuring they are paid for the labor of installing and showing their work.

“I really want to start to show people that not only do you want to invest in yourself, other people want to invest in you too,” she said.

Among those debuting at the CV Collective is Reesha Jessie, or ReeMix Media, a first-time participant whose colorful work leaps off of the canvas. This weekend, visitors will see her series of paintings of mushrooms.

“As an artist with depression, I absolutely love painting what I love and what brings me joy, and I found that it brings other people joy,” she said.

Her work also frequently incorporates a motif of eyes, “Despite my green hair, I actually have trouble being perceived. So the eyeballs in my work are showing how I perceive that feeling.”

Jessie didn’t know anything about Desert Open Studios before Lopez-Ospina reached out to her. The opportunity means that her art will get exposure to a wider audience that might not have come across her art via social media.

“I’ve been doing art for my entire life,” she said. “I finally have the confidence that I need to be able to do all this and to get my work seen.”

Part of the magic of Desert Open Studios is getting up close and personal with the art, seeing the brushstrokes on a canvas or the fingerprints in a sculpture and getting to see the person that made the art; something that is especially valuable in a world of seemingly endless AI-generated images trained on the stolen work of real artist.

“People can ask the artists about the process, and there’s just so much conversation that can be had,” Reesha said of the tour’s interactive nature. Many artists will have work up for sale ranging in size and price, offering the chance to support artists while coming away with a work of art and a story.

The self-guided tour is free to the public and runs daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

For a full map of participating studios and a digital artist handbook, visitors can go to the official Desert Open Studios website.

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