Sculpture stands against open sky at the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden, the Palm Desert home of the Palm Springs Art Museum, on Highway 111 at the head of El Paseo. The museum was founded in 1938 and has focused on design and contemporary art since 2004; this satellite location puts part of that collection outdoors, where the works stand against open sky and the Santa Rosa Mountains rather than a white wall. That setting is the whole argument for the place.
Desert light is harder and far more directional than gallery light, and it moves, so a single piece out here is legible in three or four different ways across an afternoon. This is also the right place to begin a walk down El Paseo, because everything you are about to see on that street — the median, the rotating commissions, the galleries — grows from the same civic decision this garden represents: that a resort town could be somewhere people come to look at art rather than only to golf. The sky is doing the work a gallery wall would do.