BOMBAY BEACH
When I started visiting the Salton Sea in the early 2000s, I was struck by the eerie silence that pervaded the place. The resort towns along the shore were largely abandoned—the shops and restaurants boarded up, the marinas empty, the trailer parks vacant and untended.
Bombay Beach, a small town laid out on a mile-wide grid on the eastern shore, epitomized the desolation. A succession of tropical storms had hit the area in the late 1970s and dumped so much rain into the Salton Sea that the water level rose by several feet. When the floodwaters came to Bombay Beach, most of the residents vanished.
As I wandered the empty streets, I was captivated by the abandoned possessions in the driveways and front yards: sun-bleached surf boards, faded toys, tattered paperbacks and magazines. Many of them were in situ, as if their owners had abruptly decided to leave one day and never returned.
Though Bombay Beach was mostly quiet and deserted, it seemed to attract a steady stream of visitors. Artists, photographers, filmmakers and designers seemed especially drawn to the place. On nearly every visit, I would encounter a crew making a music video or setting up a fashion shoot.
I later learned that some artists had started buying up tax-defaulted Bombay Beach properties and transforming them into makeshift artist studios, performance spaces, and conceptual art installations.
The deserts of southern California are home to many renegade artist colonies. In nearby Slab City, the late folk artist Leonard Knight created a now-famous installation called Salvation Mountain—a monument to divine love and forgiveness—using strawbales and thousands of gallons of bright colored paint. Up the road from Salvation Mountain is East Jesus, a mecca of junk art made at the site of an old dump.
It seemed fitting that Bombay Beach would take its place among these artist communities. Nothing fires up the creative imagination quite like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
In 2016, three friends and part-time residents of Bombay Beach mounted a three-day gathering to celebrate art, music and ideas as well as to spotlight the environmental crisis playing out at the Salton Sea. With a twist of irony, they called it the Bombay Beach Biennale.
It was the first of what has since become an annual gathering—one that has generated buzz in the art world and made headlines in major newspapers and magazines. It’s been called a bohemian dream, a pageantry of art and opera and weirdness, and the “anti-Burning Man.”
I’ve been covering the event for several years, my images appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, and other publications. Here are some highlights.
An aerial view of Bombay Beach on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea. At 223 feet below sea level, Bombay Beach is one of the lowest communities in the United States. It’s also one of the poorest.
In recent years, artists have taken over many of the abandoned structures of Bombay Beach, transforming them into makeshift gathering places, performance venues, art galleries and canvases for graffiti art.
Artists have been slowly transforming Bombay Beach’s abandoned waterfront into a space for public art, much of it made from driftwood and scrap.
A billboard art installation by Stefan Ashkenazy greets visitors as they arrive in Bombay Beach. With its poignant double-meaning, the piece hearkens back to the town’s heyday when it was a thriving resort community and popular destination for fishing and water-skiing.
The Bombay Beach Institute of Metaphysics, Particle Physics, and International Relations consists of little more than a few trailers and a garden, attended to by local artists who have transformed the hard-packed dirt lot into a sanctuary with grass, trees, chickens, and a profusion of lovingly assembled artworks.
During the weekend of the Biennale, the “Bombay Beach Drive-In” is a working theater featuring movies on the big screen every evening from 8 p.m. to midnight. The installation was created by Stefan Ashkenazy, Sean Dale Taylor and Arwen Byrd.
In 2019, Chris “Ssippi” Wessman and Damon James Duke built a swing set and installed it about 50 feet out from the water’s edge. They’ve had to move it at regular intervals to keep up with the Salton Sea’s receding shoreline.
Los Angeles artist Joséphine Wister Faure brought a performance piece called “Levitation” to the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale. It featured a sleeping woman (performed by Tiger Kaufman) hovering in mid-air as twilight descended over the Salton Sea. Faure described it as a “a moment suspended in time set on a beach made of salt and bones.”
How many gallons of water does it take to grow a pound of almonds? This installation by Uwe Martin at the 2023 Biennale offered up a visual representation. Each point of light is a plastic bottle of sea water reflecting the sky in the early-morning twilight. Almonds are among the most water-intensive crops and it takes approximately 1,900 gallons to grow a pound of them.
“The Open House,” an artwork by Keith Jones and Lee Henderson, features a front door that opens out to the expansive Salton Sea.
Artists Memymom and Sean Guerrero positioned their installation, “The Fourth Hatch,” a few feet out from the receding shoreline of the Salton Sea.
Midabi’s artworks are a bit like Zen koans. They don’t give up their meaning easily. You have to sit with them and let the rational intellect run in circles for a while. Then, after the mind is all pooped and confused, the meaning will begin to reveal itself. This piece, with its allusion to the dying Salton Sea, is one of several permanent, site-specific installations in Bombay Beach.
Detail from “Naked Revelations,” an installation by Israeli artist Moranne Layani at Museum #2 on a Bombay Beach side street. A sign at the museum encourages visitors to post photos taken there with the hashtag #theworldsshittiestmuseum
The renowned French mezzo-soprano Ariana Vafadari gave a spellbinding sunrise performance on the beach on the final day of the 2019 Biennale.
The Axon Orchestra performs in a procession along the waterfront at the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale.
Actress, contortionist and performance artist Bonnie Morgan puts on a show atop a set of salt-encrusted pilings near the waterfront of Bombay Beach.
Night falls over Showtown, a large installation and performance space on the waterfront created by Stefan Ashkenazy.
People come together to remember prolific Bombay Beach artist Steven “Shig” Scott who died in 2022. The installation at left was created as a tribute to Shig by his fellow artist and friend Scott Fitzel.
Artist Randy Polumbo describes his installation “Lodestar” as “a perky and pleasant little flower conjured from a military fighter jet.”
Michael “Danger Ranger” Mikel, one of the founders of Burning Man, has been coming to the Bombay Beach Biennale since it started. “This is where the edge is,” he told me, saying that it embodies much of the raw energy and creative free spirit that animated Burning Man in the early days.
Salt-encrusted pilings from an old fishing pier serve as a fitting backdrop for “Atlantis,” a permanent installation by artists Marco Walker and Tomek Sadurski in Bombay Beach.
The Free Love Phone Booth by artist Irondad.
Bombay Beach TVs, an installation on the edge of town, was created from discarded television sets. It takes up edgy themes like viral contagion, toxic dust clouds and alien invasions. The TV at lower left shows a map of Bombay Beach with the words, “You are lost.”
“You infected me in a way I didn’t know was possible.”
Artist Sean Guerrero reads from Jack Kerouac at the unveiling of his sculpture “ReInCarNation.”
Seraphina, a stiltwalker and performance artist from Los Angeles, leads a procession along the Bombay Beach waterfront.
Geoff Dyer, the noted English writer and critic, speaks at the Biennale’s annual lecture series held in a vacant and graffiti-covered structure on the edge of town.
Cameron, a Los Angeles performance artist and Biennale veteran, serves free drinks at the “Bombay Beach Beach Club” wearing only a yellow Speedo.
Participants congregate at the Beach Club—posh by Bombay Beach standards—for oysters and cocktails.
Tao Ruspoli and Stefan Ashkenazy founded the Bombay Beach Biennale in 2015 (along with Lily Johnson White) to call attention to the plight of the mostly forgotten desert town and to raise awareness about the looming environmental disaster at the Salton Sea.
