The Art Galleries of Palm Desert
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Ahh…winter. This has been the snowiest winter in memory here in Chesapeake. We’ve gone for years without seeing the least bit of snow. Well, Mother Nature must just been saving it up because we woke up to two weekends of this:
While I love snow, I don’t like traveling in it. So this was the perfect excuse to stay indoors and make jewelry and catch up on stuff that I meant to do earlier…like this blog post I wrote about my trip to Palm Springs back in er, October.
I had gone to Palm Springs, CA in October because my hubby and his Word Team Tennis league went to compete in their National Championships at Indian Wells. Being the good wife that I am, I of course had to tag along on this trip…for moral support of course. 
Being someone who’s spent most of their life on the East Coast where if something is brown, you run out to water it, the terrain of Palm Springs and the surrounding area took some getting used to. Everything is quite brown and rocky with the beautiful patches greenery, flowers, and desert foliage.
It being the desert, the temperature goes from 95 degrees in the day and 45 degrees at night which makes for a bit of a packing challenge, but there’s no humidity which is always good. Especially since hubs got a rental hook up on a neat little Volvo hardtop convertible (thanks family discount!). We were originally supposed to get a Mustang convertible, but they rented that, so we had to make do with the Volvo (*sigh…gosh darn it!).
If I rode around in this in Chesapeake with the top down I would look like Buckwheat in about 5 seconds flat. So no humidity is great The only thing is that the sun is pretty intense. It’s like sunlight is being filtered through a magnifying glass.
On about the second day of the team’s match play, I wandered around the area to see what kind of art related stuff they had. I’ve been hearing that there are some amazing galleries out this way and I stumbled on to the El Paseo area in Palm Desert. This is where I hit paydirt…big time.
El Paseo is known as the Rodeo Drive of Palm Desert. This area is often the winter home to a lot of the moneyed class. Mercedes, Jags, Aston Martins, and Bentlys are a common sight on El Paseo. Someone even parked their Rolls behind our little rented Volvo. So this area makes for some really amazing art galleries. El Paseo is home to 14 fabulous art galleries…all of them filled with amazing art.
There was also art featured up and down the street either as part of the decor of office buildings or restaurants or in the middle median of the street which featured some fun outdoor sculpture.
While I visited most of the galleries on El Paseo, I spent a lot of time in Coda Gallery located on 73-151 El Paseo. The gallery which recently celebrated it’s 20th anniversary is about 15,000 sq feet of beautiful art (upstairs and down). This gallery features a lot of blown glass, paintings, furniture, sculpture in wood, bronze, and glass in sizes all the way from desktop to outdoor size. Some of the artists Coda represents includes. The thing that I liked about this gallery is that while there was plenty of art in the $25,000 to $50,000 range there was also pieces as low as in the $40 to $100 which is cool for someone like me that doesn’t drive their own Aston Martin.
I wish that I could have taken some pictures inside, but the gallery owners quite naturally are understandably a bit leery about that so take my word that the inside of these places are amazing! In addition to Coda there are a number of other galleries that you’ll want to check out. They include:
A Gallery Fine Art
73-956 El Paseo
Edenhurst Gallery
73-600 El Paseo
Eleonore Austerer Fine Art
73-160 El PaseoSte 6
Gallery 1000
73-400 El Paseo#1
Desert Art Collection & Sculpture Garden
45-350 San Luis Rey Ave at El Paseo
J. Willott Gallery
73-190 El PaseoSte 1
Jones & Terwilliger Galleries
73-375 El Paseo
Melissa Morgan Fine Art
73-040 El Paseo
Richard Danskin Galleries
73-111 El Paseo
S.R. Brennen Galleries
73-375 El Paseo
The Hart Gallery
73-111 El Paseo
Zantman Art Galleries
73-925 El Paseo
According to the folks I spoke to, the best time to walk around in Palm Desert is between October and March, because the place turns into Dante’s Inferno during the spring and summer. Well, could have fooled me….I came back home with a nice crispy tan in time for Thanksgiving. It was only a balmy 90 degrees in the day! Ouch!
So if you ever find yourself in the Palm Desert/Palm Springs area, take a nice tour of the El Paseo section for a great day of art.
And keep the sunblock handy!
