Palm Springs Art Museum
Desert modernist museum by E. Stewart Williams, with art, design and the rebuilt Aluminaire House.
The museum was founded in 1938 as the Palm Springs Desert Museum, at first combining natural history with art. Its present home opened in 1976 to a design by E. Stewart Williams, one of the architects most closely associated with desert modernism in the Coachella Valley. The long, low building of volcanic stone and concrete is cut into the foot of Mount San Jacinto and organised around sunken sculpture gardens, so that galleries step down through the site and daylight is drawn in from courtyards rather than from the harsh western sun.
Collections cover modern and contemporary art, photography, glass, Native American and Western American art, and the architecture and design of the region. The institution also runs the Architecture and Design Center in a 1961 bank building by Williams on South Palm Canyon Drive, a sculpture garden in Palm Desert, and Frey House II, Albert Frey's hillside house of 1964. In 2024 the Aluminaire House, a prefabricated metal dwelling of 1931 by Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher, was reassembled on the museum's grounds. The building also contains the Annenberg Theater.
Highlights
- E. Stewart Williams's 1976 building of stone, concrete and sunken courtyards
- The 1931 Aluminaire House by Albert Frey, reassembled on the grounds
- Collections of desert modernist architecture and design
- The Annenberg Theater, used for concerts, film and talks
