Located just southeast of Joshua Tree National Park and roughly three hours from University of California, Irvine, the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve encompasses 303 acres of boulder-strewn terrain within the Morongo Basin, occasionally interrupted by shallow canyons and jagged ridges of granite. Out on the ridge, three floristic regions meet: the Transverse Ranges and the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts. Scores of animals range across these biomes, including desert and coastal horned lizards, desert and dusky-footed woodrats, and Gambel’s and mountain quail; habitats of piñon-juniper woodland mix with Joshua trees and montane chaparral. Monsoon rains create desert wash and freshwater seep at roughly four-thousand-foot elevations.
It is a place where not only plants, animals, and habitats converge, but where scientific research and visual art practices also coalesce. Owned and maintained by the University of California and managed through UC Nature, in partnership with its sub-group UC Irvine Nature, the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve is one of forty-two sites of its kind. These reserves protect undisturbed stretches of California marsh, desert, woodland, meadow, and beach for educational purposes, supporting field studies across disciplines and giving UC students the opportunity to engage with these ecologies—whether they’re studying climate science, researching how plant life adapts to climate change, or making art.
UC Nature is also one of the school system’s best-kept secrets. “[The reserves] are unique assets…beautiful, ecologically valuable,” said Kailen Mooney, who serves as the faculty director of UC Irvine Nature and Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.1 “[They’re] gems scattered all over the state.” However, because they exist off campus, the reserves are chronically underfunded and often prove difficult to access. Classes that intend to use the reserves typically require extra planning and risk management from faculty members that most of them simply can’t take on. “The majority of our users are typically biologists,” explained Kathleen Wong, Director of Communications at UC Nature. “But certainly not everybody.”2 Many reserves have supported arts projects over the years. In 2021, UC Santa Cruz photography department head Karolina Karlic and California State University Los Angeles assistant professor of film Joseph Gallegos founded the Unseen California fellowship, which brings working artists to multiple sites for research and creative production to illustrate, for example, the scientific study of fog as it crawls and settles across the Central Coast.
Deep in the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve, a small project space and art gallery offers mutual and intramural artistic inspiration in an unruly locale, far from the sterile facilities and academic bureaucracy of most conventional art-school environments. Burns Projects, as it was christened in 2025, operates as a quasi-collective, artist-driven environment, balancing institutional support with student agency and improvisation. Students are encouraged to remain detached from outcomes and embrace spontaneity—the life force behind creative practice—and are rewarded with breakthroughs, if they can manage to adjust to the whims of the desert.
Burns Projects occupies the former workshop of Bruce Burns, a retired mechanical engineer who, along with his wife Jean, bought 320 acres of land in Yucca Valley in 1947 and named it Piñon Ridge. When the couple first moved to the high desert, Yucca Valley was quaint and sleepy, with no recorded population. In historic accounts, residents were described as “homesteaders” or “five-acre people,” a reference to the Small Tract Act of 1938, which allowed individuals to claim up to five acres of public desert land in the Mojave under the condition that they make improvements, typically by building a small structure within a set period of time.3 A prodigious inventor, Bruce designed and built a cabin and machine-shop-slash-laboratory, each highly attuned to the surrounding landscape. Both structures were planned around the sun cycle to ensure that there was always a shady spot to take refuge in; an open space between the cabin’s kitchen and back patio accommodated the wind that whips through the canyon at any hour of the day—sometimes at up to fifty miles per hour.
Twenty-five years later, the couple dedicated 265 acres of their land and property structures to the University of California and UC Nature, previously called the Natural Reserve System (NRS). After Bruce’s death in 1973, Jean sold another forty-one acres to the university and gave the remaining fourteen to the couple’s children. For years after, Bruce’s rectangular workshop sat unused, filled with surplus tools and materials that had piled up over time while UC Irvine faculty and researchers used the couple’s nearby cabin as a field station.
UC Irvine professor Jesse Colin Jackson first pondered the site’s potential for ecological study and experimental artmaking alike in 2019. Jackson reached out to UC Irvine student Liz Stringer, who runs After Hours gallery—a salon-style, roving project dedicated to conversation, community, and exhibition-building—with Amy McKay and Kim Garcia, and pitched the derelict Burns space as a site for graduate students to use (if they could help clean it up). “The opportunity to build something that was going to last…was really attractive,” said Jackson, who wears many hats at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, including professor of Electronic Art and Design, Associate Dean of Research and Innovation, and Executive Director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology. Over the course of a long weekend, Jackson, Stringer, and a small group of students filled a forty-yard dumpster with detritus, recycling nearly 6000 pounds of metal along the way. By 2022, a graduate seminar course called Arts at Burns Piñon, which combined independent creative projects with collective labor to build out the site, was ready to launch. Across two iterations, Jackson and his collaborators—including co-instructors Stringer in 2022 and Zang in 2024—oversaw graduate art students as they cleaned, fundraised for, and activated the derelict property, transforming it into a functioning arts project space. Jackson and Zang will be offering the course again to students across the UC system in 2026. In the spring of 2023, the collective also brought an undergraduate class to the site for a series of art-and-ecology workshops.
According to Mooney, what Jackson and his students have been doing at Burns Piñon is unusual among the reserves, and completely innovative. Burns Projects has “increased the importance of the reserves…and gotten more people out there,” he said. Since the project space’s completion, Jackson’s art-driven classes and exhibitions have brought new audiences into the field and expanded how the reserve system is utilized. “It’s been my pleasure to work with him and just encourage him to kind of do whatever he wants,” Mooney added. Not only does Burns Projects support the preservation of California’s delicate natural landscapes; it also engages students and faculty to consider the land from a more embodied perspective. “It’s a different way to learn about our environment than measuring rainfall and capturing butterflies,” said Wong. “We want to encourage that as much as possible.”
In keeping with Bruce and Jean Burns’s original ethos, Burns Projects’s relationship to its surrounds is the opposite of extractive. As a labor of love that is contingent upon a deep reverence for the local ecology, it mirrors the vision and philosophy of UC Nature. Established in 1965 with zero funding, the NRS, as it was called then, was the brainchild of Kenneth S. Norris, a conservationist who, as a zoology graduate student at UCLA in the early 1950s, traveled into the desert of the Coachella Valley to study iguanas. Norris spent weeks on a chosen site observing their behavior and food habits, traveling back to Los Angeles only once. When he returned to the desert, he found the entire site bulldozed in preparation for a motel. “All of his study animals were gone. The bushes and the ecosystem that they depended on were gone,” Wong explained. In the post-war period, California’s population, particularly in the desert regions of Southern California, was on the rise, and real estate development became rampant, flattening and scorching nearly 240,000 acres of precious ecosystems.
After the devastating loss of his desert research, Norris completely started over. He began working instead with marine life and eventually became the director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Marine Studies and a cofounder of SeaWorld. In the early ’70s, Norris pitched an idea to Clark Kerr, then president of the UC system, of a network of dedicated and protected ecosystems inside which researchers and students could conduct short and long-term studies of California’s eleven diverse geomorphic provinces. Seven field sites across the ten campuses were established or retrofitted into the new Natural Land and Water Reserves System, later known as the Natural Reserves System program and now UC Nature.
Similar to the more science-based research and activities occurring across UC Nature, Burns Projects promotes models of making and learning that respond to the flora and fauna of its surrounds. For Burns Projects’s inaugural presentation in November 2025, Jackson invited Zang, who lives nearby in Landers, to be the first artist-in-residence and christen the site as an official exhibition space. Zang’s resulting show of sculptures and compost paintings, titled “Molds,” featured sculptures cast from molds of trash found in his yard, such as cardboard boxes, runoff, car parts, and other material detritus of desert life. Zang also presented compost paintings—canvases placed by the artist under his slowly decaying compost pile such that juices from decomposing food waste created dun-colored, drippy compositions.
Liz Stringer’s practice also incorporates natural science and local materials. For the fall 2025 exhibition Mostly Thorns, which also featured work by Hiroshi Clark, and Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, Stringer presented So Blue (2025), a fabric-netted sculpture inspired by bird and bat mists—enormous nets deployed by research students to gently catch and study winged birds and mammals, including three rare species of bats native to the area. The formal composition of the work oscillated as its striped, semitranslucent fabric billowed in the wind. A sound work echoed this effect: a recording of Stringer whistling Prince’s eponymous song So Blue was only audible when the wind died down.
While these projects are defined by their desert context, they also unfortunately coexist with its continued and accelerated ecological devastation. From the fallacy of self-reliance perpetuated by the hordes of wealthy attendees of the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, to the unregulated proliferation of Tulum-style Airbnbs that litter the greater Morongo Basin, to the proposed 196-foot communications tower which would radically affect the local biodiversity of Morongo Valley, extractive, tourist-focused enterprises operate on the colonialist assumption that any and all land is for the taking—especially arid landscapes that look empty, despite being ecologically dense, culturally layered, and long-inhabited.
In Deserts Are Not Empty, a 2022 anthology edited by Samia Henni on the political, environmental, and cultural constructions of arid landscapes, the desert is reframed not as a void but as a site shaped by colonial power, ecological complexity, and contested histories of land use and representation. Henni writes that this idea of emptiness functions less as description than as a political tool that erases existing human, ecological, and historical presence. Indeed, before even the settlers, the homesteaders, and the real estate developers moved in, Yucca Valley and surrounding neighborhoods of the Morongo Basin were home to a crossroads of Indigenous communities who moved seasonally between the San Bernardino Mountains and the Colorado Desert, including the Maara’yam (Serrano) and Ivilyuat (Cahuilla) peoples, gathering resources, maintaining trade routes, and sustaining lifeways that spanned thousands of years.
That layered human history is inseparable from the land itself, where overlapping ecologies and shifting habitats have long shaped how life moves through and gathers in the basin. The Burns Piñon Ridge protects an imperiled ecosystem, where students can study natural processes in a pristine region—an environment that’s immersive, accessible but quiet, away from urban disturbances. A site where the Yucca moth—Mooney’s favorite organism—can quietly pollinate without disturbance of dirt bikes, where dozens of ant species can build nests without pesticides, where artists and students like Stringer can experiment with installation, sound art, theater, and dance in a singular environment, far from any white cubes or ivory towers.
Telephone conversation, March 12, 2026
Telephone conversation, March 18, 2026
George H. Balazs, The Heritage of Yucca Valley, vol. 1, 1984.
