Desert X
Desert X is produced by The Desert Biennial, a not-for-profit organization founded in California. Its guiding purposes and principles include presenting public exhibitions of art that respond meaningfully to the conditions of desert locations, the environment and indigenous communities; promoting cultural exchange and education programs that foster dialogue and understanding among cultures and communities about shared artistic, historical, and societal issues; and providing an accessible platform for artists from around the world to address ecological, cultural, spiritual, and other existential themes.
Artist: Xaviera Simmons
Because You Know Ultimately We Will Band A Militia
Desert X 2021, Coachella Valley, CA, March 12 – May 16, 2021
Curated by Desert X Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-curator César García-Alvarez
Presented by Richard Mille
Photos courtesy the Artist and David Castillo
Photography by Lance Gerber for Desert X
Xaviera Simmons created work that temporarily occupied a series of billboards for Desert X 2021 on Gene Autry Trail in Palm Springs. Its foundational ingredients are reverence, resistance, and the redistribution of tangible material resources.
“It is not that Indigenous or First Nations people or the Black descendants of American chattel slavery have never had the imagination for monuments,” Xaviera Simmons says. “It’s that white America, particularly as represented and enforced by local, state, and federal governments, has consistently attempted and often succeeded to terrorize the impulse of self-defining monumentality out of those groups — groups which my own ancestry rests.” — Xaviera Simmons