Shandel Sutherland • March 30, 2025
UPDATE: Borrego Springs Music Festival
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2025 Borrego Springs Music Festival Highlights
The 2025 Borrego Springs Music Festival has wrapped up, but you can still enjoy the experience through photos and videos from the event.
Thanks to Mike Rue of The Ram Community Radio, we’re sharing some of the best moments from the festival. Check out the highlights and relive the music!
Friday March 21st
Video Credit: Mike Rue at The Ram Borrego Valley Community Radio
Saturday March 22nd
Image Credit: Mike Rue at The Ram Borrego Valley Community Radio
Sunday March 23nd
Video Credit: Mike Rue at The Ram Borrego Valley Community Radio
Borrego Springs Music Festival: Celebrating Music and Arts in the Desert
The Borrego Springs Music Festival is a cornerstone of creativity in the Borrego Springs community. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the festival is dedicated to enriching lives through music and art while fostering a deep connection to the arts in this unique desert setting.
Supporting Music and Art Education
More than just a celebration, the Borrego Springs Music Festival is committed to supporting music and art education. The festival proudly funds and operates the Borrego Academy of Music and Art (BAMA), an initiative that provides opportunities for students of all ages to explore their artistic potential.
At BAMA, students engage in a wide range of classes, including:
- Music theory and sight reading
- Guitar, keyboard, and drums
- Acting and singing
- Home recording and ukulele
With programs designed to inspire creativity, BAMA is shaping the future of the arts in Borrego Springs and beyond.
A Community-Driven Festival
The Borrego Springs Music Festival is a festival for the community, by the community, featuring artists from the community. Through its events and programs, the festival supports local music programs, performing arts education, and the Borrego Springs school district, ensuring a lasting impact on future generations.
How You Can Support
As a nonprofit organization, the Borrego Springs Music Festival relies on community support to continue its mission. Your tax-deductible donations help fund programs like BAMA and sustain local arts initiatives.
Visit the festival’s website to learn how you can:
- Donate to support music and art education
- Attend upcoming performances and events
- Share the mission of the Borrego Springs Music Festival with friends and family
- Borrego Springs Music Festival - Website
- Borrego Springs Music Festival - Facebook
- Borrego Academy of Music and Arts (BAMA)
Learn More About Borrego Springs Art and Music Scene
Borrego Springs Performing Arts Center is seeking sponsors for its November 21 fundraiser
Join the artist ARhAyas PSonn AllureA for ARTTALK on Saturday, November 21 at 3pm at The Gallery at The Palms to converse about his assemblage collages relating to the erasure of Goddess wisdom and its metamorphosis to time present. Refreshments will be served for your enjoyment. The Gallery at The Palms is located at 2220 Hoberg Road, Borrego Springs, Ca. 92004
By: Brice Weaver www.briceweaverphotography What happens when a photograph becomes your only memory of something you experienced? I recently came across an Instagram video of a woman looking through photographs with her husband, who had apparently suffered a brain injury affecting his memory. The photographs captured their first dance together. As they looked through them, she gently asked whether he remembered certain moments. I found myself thinking about that video long after watching it. For her, those photographs were connected to experiences she could still remember. For him, they offered a visual record of moments he could no longer recall. We take photographs assuming we’ll remember the moments surrounding them. But what happens when we don’t? What happens when a photograph becomes our only connection to an experience, a person, or a particular time in our lives? And what happens when that photograph has been altered so extensively that it no longer represents what actually occurred? We’re living in a time when artificial intelligence can generate convincing images of events that never happened. Digital editing allows us to remove people, replace backgrounds, alter expressions, and reconstruct scenes until they bear little resemblance to the original moment. Much of the debate surrounding AI-generated imagery focuses on creativity, copyright, and whether these images should even be considered photography. But I think there’s another question we aren’t discussing nearly enough. What happens when the photographs we create today become the memories someone depends on tomorrow? Now Imagine looking through your own photographs decades later, unable to distinguish which details were genuine and which had been added, removed, or generated. Human memory is already imperfect. We forget, reconstruct, and sometimes unintentionally change our recollections. Photographs have traditionally provided an external reference, even if that reference was never entirely objective. If we begin treating every photograph as something to be perfected rather than preserved, what happens to that relationship? That short video brought the issue into a much more human perspective for me. The couple wasn’t discussing photography, artificial intelligence, or photographic ethics. They were simply looking at pictures, trying to reconnect with moments from their lives. You don’t need photographs to show a better version of your life. You need them to show the life you actually lived. We spend so much time asking how to make photographs look better. Perhaps we should spend more time asking what we need them to remember. As AI and digital manipulation become increasingly sophisticated, where do you draw the line between improving a photograph and changing the history it represents?
Six artists come together for a collective exhibition Check out the most recent review by Art Critic, Sally Walsh Gary Henderson Interiors Studio 628 will celebrate its season opening with Mixed Tempos, a collective exhibition featuring Kevin Goddess, Victoria Johnson, Kippi Leonard, Robert Landry, Wil Gardner and Marcy Gregory. Mixed Tempos at Studio 628 & Galeria el Patio 622 Palm Canyon Drive, Borrego Springs CA. Show goes through November, Gallery Hours Friday-Sunday 1:00-4:00 PM. Bringing six artists together in one exhibition, Mixed Tempos offers visitors an opportunity to explore their work and welcome the return of the local gallery season. The evening will also include a sneak preview of Galeria el Patio, adding another reason to stop by and see what’s ahead. Community members and visitors are invited to join the celebration, enjoy the exhibition and spend an evening connecting with Borrego Springs’ arts community.
Learn More About Borrego Springs
Curated by Elizabeth Rodriguez, “The Outliers” brings together seven self-taught artists, several of them local to Borrego, at The Gallery at The Palms through Nov. 1.
Art, Texture and Form in Borrego Springs
Join us in celebration of Borrego Days and, And now there's this: The Outliers exhibition. Artists will talk about their work and its relationship to "outsider art", the outer boundaries of art production and challenging conventions of mainstream art culture. Refreshments, artists and ARTTALK! - Elizabeth Rodriguez, Curator The Gallery at The Palms at Indian Head 2220 Hoberg Road, Borrego Springs, CA 92004
Vintage Volkswagens roll into Borrego Springs for a weekend built around driving, desert roads and community.
Join us for Taste of the Backcountry, a culinary showcase.
Learn More About Borrego Springs
Known as the PAC6 Painters (PAC6), Linda Brown, Marian Fortunati, Nita Harper, Debra Holladay, Laura Wambsgans, and Sharon Weaver have explored and documented the landscape together for the past 10 years. Dedicated to painting the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape, the Southern California-based collaborating artists share a love of the wild outdoors and painting en plein air. Following in the historic footsteps of the California Impressionists, the PAC6 creates landscapes of iconic locations from a new and contemporary perspective. The paintings not only allow viewers to visit and revisit these places, but also take them on a journey through each artist’s individual interpretation of their experience. As Laura Wambsgans explains “Capturing the light within the landscape, nature’s palette, and the true sense of a place is our desire with each landscape painting. If we are successful, the viewer will feel the sun and wind and forget what is on the wall outside the frame.” The group’s first trip to Canyon de Chelly in 2013 solidified their partnership and was where they dedicated themselves to creating bodies of plein air and studio work for exhibiting as a group. Armed with easels, paints, and brushes, they’ve hit the trails, explored deserts, climbed mountains, and waded in the lakes and streams. Highlights of their trips include a pack trip by mule into the Sierras back country to Lake Ediza (and a bear that won’t forget them), jumping mules, a late-night stroll through the Silver Terrace cemetery under a full moon, forest fires, tumbles and twisted body parts, and crunched cars. Other painting expeditions include Yosemite Valley (with a snow trip planned for 2025), Carmel, Vermilion Cliffs, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, Virginia City, and Lake Tahoe. Upcoming trips are already planned this year for June Lake, Rankin Ranch, and a fourth trip to Carmel. Linda Brown sums it up when she says, “Wandering the great outdoors and painting its beauty, from grand mountain vistas to butterfly wings, is a joy we simply could not live without.” Most recently, the PAC6 took on the Anza Borrego Desert. Multiple plein air trips over the past 16 months have resulted in a collection of plein air and studio paintings that showcase the variety and beauty of the desert. The group’s upcoming exhibit at the Borrego Art Institute, On the Trail of Plein Air Masters with the PAC6, opens October 17, 2026 and runs through November 29, 2026. Regardless of the destination, at the end of each adventure the PAC6 Painters brush off their jeans, smile at each other, and proclaim “… and nobody died.” The PAC6 Painters are: Linda Brown , www.lindabrownart.com Marian Fortunati , www.marianfortunati.com Nita Harper , www.nitaharper.com Debra Holladay , www.debraholladay.net Laura Wambsgans , www.laurawambsgans.com Sharon Weaver , www.sharonweaver.com
