Palm Springs Art Museum to host fall exhibitions opening party

The Palm Springs Art Museum will host an opening party Wednesday to celebrate its two new fall exhibitions.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday featuring three DJ sets, LED performers, a 360 photo booth and food from 849 and Taquizas El Chicali, according to museum officials. Tickets are available for $25.

The “Color and Shadow”-themed event will capture Phillip K. Smith III’s explorations of light and Petra Cortright’s complex image layering, museum officials said. Attendees are encouraged to dress from head-to-toe in a single color or in all black for the night.

Smith’s and Cortright’s exhibitions will be featured in the museum’s main galleries along with a month-long small-format exhibition by Gabriela Ruiz.

Smith’s exhibition “Light + Change” was initially scheduled for 2020, but it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was raised in the Coachella Valley, frequented the art museum since he was a child and is now a member of the museum’s board of trustees.

“Inspired by the daily light phenomena of the desert, many works slowly shift from hue to hue as determined by Phillip’s precisely paced color choreography,” museum officials said.

Cortright’s exhibition “Sapphire Cinnamon Viper Fairy,” will feature art in traditional genres native to the digital age. She was initially recognized in the early 2000s for her series of self-portrait videos with unconventional uses of standard special effects.

“While the work originates from an endless digital realm, my decision to `save as’ finalizes the painting and gives it a unique place in the `real world’ forever,” Cortright said in a statement. “I have a deep love of physical things and physical spaces.”

Ruiz’s outburst project will feature art centered on issues of identity, the body, desire and self-fashioning, featuring everyday materials blended into a diverse range of mediums, according to museum officials.

More from Art