Latashá first arrived at Ace Hotel & Swim Club Palm Springs in early spring, carrying little more than her cameras, a portable recording rig and a head full of visions. For thirty days the musician‑turned‑multimedia artist roamed the desert—hiking sun‑bleached canyons at dawn, watching wildfire smoke stain the horizon, listening to Agua Caliente elders speak of the Cahuilla people’s bond with the land. Each encounter fed a growing idea: that the planet’s upheavals and our own internal shifts are echoes of the same vibration.
That idea has crystallized into “muva_nature,” the newest exhibition to emerge from Ace Hotel’s global Artist‑in‑Residence program. Installed in the lobby on view through August , the work feels less like a series of objects than a living organism. Thermo‑imaging footage ripples across screens, colors inverted until mountains pulse red‑hot and palm fronds glow electric blue. Poetry weaves through whispered field recordings; a thumping electronic score—composed on site—rises and falls like desert wind.
Latashá’s residency is also a first for Ace: the hotel invited culture collective Friends With Benefits (FWB) and pioneering Superchief Gallery to co‑curate, bringing Web3 into the heart of the property. The result is an interactive NFT that allows visitors to step inside those heat maps and claim a fragment of the experience; the digital auction opens the same day the lobby show does.
If Latashá’s name sounds familiar, it may be from 2021, when she minted music‑video NFTs for her singles “glo up” and “gogo wyne,” netting nearly $100,000 and proving that blockchain can empower independent artists. Here, though, she trades swagger for reverence. “muva_nature,” she says, “is a meditation on remembering that we are not separate from the earth—no one owns this land; we belong to it.”
The exhibition anchors Ace’s Palm Springs property in a larger renaissance of its AIR initiative, which has hosted more than four hundred painters, sculptors, dancers and sound artists across the brand’s hotels. For the 2024‑25 season, Ace has enlisted Byline in Brooklyn, commune in Kyoto, Powerhouse Arts in New York, The Substation in Sydney, and the FWB + Superchief duo here in the desert to choose artists whose voices resonate with each location.
How to experience it
Where: Ace Hotel & Swim Club Palm Springs, 701 E. Palm Canyon Dr.
When: On‑site lobby exhibition. Open daily; hotel guests and locals welcome.
Cost: Free to view; NFTs available via Superchief’s marketplace.