
Above: Iván Argote, "A Point of View" at DesertX. All photos by Lance Gerber.
California's dry desert got some Minnesota love this year.
Featuring 18 outdoor installations, the Coachella Valley-based desert art biennial DesertX was co-curated by Twin Cities-native Matthew Schum and his wife, Philly-native Amanda Hunt. (Artistic Director Neville Wakefield led the curatorial team.) Closing April 21, DesertX includes artworks that touch on climate change, immigration, gun violence and augmented realit. With the installations located across 55 miles of the Coachella Valley, it takes about two days to see everything.
Schum got interested in art while growing up in Minnesota. With money earned through car sales, he saved enough to travel the world and fall in love with connecting with people from different cultures. He left Minnesota for college in Vancouver, B.C., then moved to NYC to work as a researcher in the photo department at MoMA and an editor at Zing Magazine. He earned his PhD at UC-San Diego, and that's where he spent time researching contemporary art biennials and exhibitions outside museums.
The Star Tribune caught up with Schum to learn more about his curatorial path and his Minnesota roots.
Q: How does curating art in this wide-open desert fit into your vision of making art accessible to all? How does it speak to your working-class background?
A: DesertX is open whenever people want to visit. It is not an institution that has regular operating hours, so I think that makes it more populous, in a positive way.
When you go out to the site, what's amazing is how public it is – very diverse, there is a lot of wealth, a lot of working-class people, and some poverty. You are gonna see a cross-section at each of the sites you go to. 55 miles between the works, from the most northern to the most southern. I think you need 2 days to see it all.