Upstart art fair brings collectors to an Old West movie set in the California desert

Miniature donkeys greet visitors to the Pioneertown Motel during the High Desert Art Fair on 8-9 March Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
The High Desert Art Fair in Pioneertown, California, held its third edition last weekend (8-9 March), with 12 participating galleries filling up the rooms at the Pioneertown Motel with works from across the region. The fair also featured a programme of artist talks and a concert series featuring local musicians. Art enthusiasts, kids, dogs and a few miniature donkeys kicked up dirt in the old ghost town movie set-turned-high desert hotspot.
Established in 1946 as a live-in, Old West-style movie set, Pioneertown has endured films, fires and decades of tourists, and still features a handful of surviving structures designed to resemble a frontier town in the late 19th century. This includes the famous roadside restaurant and music venue, Pappy & Harriet's, the recently renovated Red Dog Saloon and the Pioneertown Motel itself.
Freshly renovated in 2022 by Mike and Matt French of the design and development studio Life & Times, 12 of the motel’s 19 rooms operated as gallery stands for local desert galleries like Compound and Yucca Valley Material Lab, Los Angeles-based galleries like Gattopardo, Craig Krull Gallery, Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory and Gross! Gallery. The fair even drew a Southern gallery, Red Arrow, from Nashville.
One of the gallery stands in a room at the Pioneertown Motel during the High Desert Art Fair Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
The surrounding area, which spans the towns of Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, Landers and Twentynine Palms, has long been a popular enclave with artists from Noah Purifoy to Andrea Zittel and Alma Allen. But its popularity has grown more rapidly and widely in the past decade, especially since 2020, when large numbers of Angelenos departed the city in favour of clear desert air during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since then, galleries, groups and programmes have emerged in the area, in addition to existing spaces like the established High Desert Test Sites. They include the Mojave Artists of Color Collective and High Desert Artists, as well as new series of artist talks, workshops and music programming at the Firehouse Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley Material Lab and the Lazy Eye Gallery, plus Art Walks in Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms, and the recently relaunched Hi Desert Cultural Center.
Visitors to the High Desert Art Fair at the Pioneertown Motel Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
According to the artist Caroline Partamian, a partner in the Yucca Valley-based gallery Compound, the area has seen the number of artists and the diversity of media they are practicing flourish in the last five years she has been living in the area, which is around a two-hour drive east of Los Angeles.
“There’s a strong desire to make communal connections with art and artists living here, but it can still be isolating and inaccessible if you don’t know what’s happening or when and where things are happening,” Partamian tells The Art Newspaper.
For participating galleries, the High Desert Art Fair is a means to plug into the art scene in the area, meet other desert dwellers and make connections outside of the desert. “[At Compound], we try to bring in a mix of local, domestic and international artists so that those opportunities for connection outside the Mojave become available,” Partamian says. “All these local projects and galleries are working towards being more visible despite already being public—there still seems to be barriers with access, financially, socially or otherwise.”
A visitor examines one of the gallery stands in a room at the Pioneertown Motel during the High Desert Art Fair Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
According to the High Desert Art Fair co-founder Nicholas Fahey, the fair originated in 2019 as a way to get collectors from Malibu to come out to the desert, offering them a tour of the area while stopping at artists’ studios along the way.
"Getting people to come out and buy stuff is great, but it’s more about creating an experience that collectors want to be a part of, that they want to come back to next year, [that] is great because they’re going to connect with people,” Fahey, an entrepreneur who works in development and the arts, tells The Art Newspaper. Building those connections is key to making sales for desert artists especially, he adds. Even if they do not buy work the weekend of the fair, would-be collectors have made a new connection so when they are ready, they know who to contact.
One of the gallery stands in a room at the Pioneertown Motel during the High Desert Art Fair Courtesy High Desert Art Fair
“We saw a real need to bring a 360-degree art fair to the high desert where not only locals but also Angelenos could come out and enjoy a destination in a beautiful place where kids and animals are welcome,” says Candice Lawler, an art agent and patron who co-founded the fair with Fahey. “The real hope is that we’re bringing different communities together to have conversations about art.”
For some exhibitors, amid the year-round onslaught of white-walled art fair experiences, alternative events like High Desert Art Fair are more distinctive, relaxed and intimate, creating spaces for more meaningful connections.
“I’ve found myself gravitating towards alternative art fairs, and the High Desert Art Fair is exactly that," says the curator an gallerist Yiwei Lu, who adds that she usually participates in more than five fairs each year with her space, Yiwei Gallery. “I wanted to be part of something while it’s still in the making and I appreciate spaces that break away from the traditional format.”
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