XOXO Palm Springs, a 12-day citywide arts and culture celebration, is being launched as a soft opening with hopes of becoming a major annual draw
Palm Springs has never lacked for spectacle.
The city has Modernism Week, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Greater Palm Springs Pride, VillageFest, a deep bench of live music venues, an increasingly visible gallery scene, a resurgent theater culture with a hub in the recently renovated Plaza Theater, four museums and the kind of hospitality economy that can turn a warm desert night into a civic asset.
Now, city tourism leaders and arts advocates are trying to knit those strengths together in a new way.
XOXO Palm Springs, a citywide arts, culture and music festival scheduled for June 11-22, is being introduced this year as a 12-day celebration of the city’s creative identity and economy. The event is being positioned as part festival, part cultural showcase and part summer placemaking strategy, arriving just after Greater Palm Springs Restaurant Week and just before the Palm Springs International ShortFest.
The timing is not incidental. In a resort city where the business calendar has long been shaped by high-season tourism, shoulder-season promotions and summer heat, XOXO Palm Springs appears designed to make June feel less like a slowdown and more like a cultural corridor.
The festival’s programming is extensive, ranging from theater, film and music to architecture tours, gallery walks, food-centered experiences, museum activities and nightlife events. But the larger business story is not simply the number of things to do. The goal is to package Palm Springs’ existing cultural ecosystem into a recognizable annual platform that gives visitors another reason to book rooms, dine out, buy tickets, explore downtown and extend their stay.
City Councilmember Jeffrey Bernstein, who has championed the effort, described XOXO Palm Springs as a concept emerging from the city’s own arts and culture organizations.
Palm Springs City Council Member, Jeffrey Bernstein.
“XOXO Palm Springs is a unique concept brought by the arts and culture organizations in our community,” Bernstein said in materials promoting the launch. “They recognized that our city has a greater depth and breadth of offerings than many larger cities. We have four major museums and several others, over 70 live music venues, a dozen film festivals, five theater companies, two symphonies, two large choral groups, two dance companies, more than 100 galleries and studios. Plus, major cultural events such as Palm Springs International Film Festival, Greater Palm Springs Pride, and Modernism Week.”
That breadth is the foundation of the festival’s pitch. Palm Springs is not inventing an arts scene for the sake of filling a calendar. It is trying to organize and brand one that already exists.
A Summer Festival Built From Existing Strengths
The first XOXO Palm Springs is being described as a “soft opening,” with organizers hoping it can grow into something larger in the years ahead. Supported by Visit Palm Springs and the city of Palm Springs, the festival is structured as a citywide experience rather than a single-site event.
The lineup touches many of the city’s familiar cultural nodes: the Plaza Theatre, Palm Springs Cultural Center, Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Modernism Week tours, downtown galleries, hotel venues, live music spaces, restaurants, clubs and public gathering places.
That approach matters because it spreads activity across the city rather than concentrating it in one venue. For restaurants, hotels, bars, galleries and small businesses, the opportunity is not limited to ticket sales. It is the broader economic activity generated by people moving through downtown and nearby districts over nearly two weeks.
The festival also arrives as Palm Springs continues to lean into its identity as a year-round destination rather than a place defined only by winter visitors and spring events. The city’s cultural brand has long been tied to midcentury architecture, LGBTQ+ tourism, film, design, music, nightlife and desert leisure. XOXO Palm Springs gives those elements a common seasonal banner.
The Visit Palm Springs guide describes the festival as a way to see the city “through a new creative lens,” with programming organized around stage, film, music, art, food, tours and family-friendly activities. The festival’s public materials also emphasize the region’s cultural roots, including the ancestral lands of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, while pointing visitors toward institutions such as the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.
For locals and repeat visitors, that may be the most promising part of the concept. The festival does not depend on a single headliner. It depends on the cumulative power of Palm Springs itself.
See the full event guide here: https://visitpalmsprings.com/blog/post/xoxo-palm-springs/
Strategic Timing For The Tourism Economy
XOXO Palm Springs fits into a broader sequence of early-summer visitor programming.
Greater Palm Springs Restaurant Week runs May 29 through June 7, offering prix fixe menus and special dining promotions across the nine-city region. XOXO Palm Springs begins four days later. Palm Springs International ShortFest follows June 23-29, bringing filmmakers, industry professionals and film audiences to the city for one of North America’s major short film showcases.
Together, the three events create a nearly month-long arc of dining, culture and film activity at a time of year when hospitality businesses are increasingly looking for ways to sustain momentum after the peak season.
That is the broader local angle. Palm Springs’ tourism economy has always been calendar-driven. Modernism Week anchors February. The Palm Springs International Film Festival helps define January. Pride brings major activity in November. Splash House and other music-centered events help animate summer. Restaurant Week gives the region an early-summer dining push.
XOXO Palm Springs could become another piece of that year-round strategy, particularly if it provides cultural organizations, restaurants, hotels and venues with a shared promotional framework.
The festival’s breadth also makes it accessible to multiple audiences. A visitor interested in architecture can connect with Modernism Week programming. A family can find museum activities. A nightlife audience can find live music, drag brunches, DJs or cabaret-style events. Filmgoers can use the festival as a bridge into ShortFest. Residents can participate without committing to a major-ticket weekend.
That mix gives XOXO Palm Springs a practical advantage: It can function as both a visitor draw and a local engagement campaign.
Not A Calendar, But A Signal
The challenge for an event this broad is clarity.
There are enough events, shows, tours, screenings, performances, art walks and dining experiences that a full listing would overwhelm the larger point. The importance of XOXO Palm Springs is not that every entry on the calendar will attract a large audience. It is that the city is attempting to tell a more unified story about its creative economy.
In that sense, the festival is less a one-time event than a branding vehicle.
The name itself, XOXO Palm Springs, carries a tone that fits the destination: affectionate, stylish, slightly playful and built for social sharing. Promotional materials include a modular brand design that can be adapted across arts categories, suggesting organizers are already thinking beyond the initial year.
If the event grows, the potential is significant. Palm Springs has the venues, cultural organizations, restaurants, hotels and civic brand needed to support a larger summer festival. What it needs is coherence, advance planning, marketing investment and enough signature programming to make future editions feel essential rather than merely abundant.
The soft-opening approach may help. By launching with existing organizations and a broad calendar, organizers can test what resonates, identify gaps, build partnerships and refine the concept before trying to scale.
Council member Bernstein noted that all the other extremely successful cultural events in the city and throughout the region had to start from scratch and build over time. That’s what he and many others are working towards here: have a great first go at it, learn from it, then build upon it for the future.
A Civic And Commercial Opportunity
For Palm Springs, XOXO Palm Springs lands at the intersection of culture and commerce.
Arts organizations gain visibility. Hotels gain another reason to promote June stays. Restaurants and bars can capture spillover traffic. Galleries and museums can reach visitors who might otherwise know Palm Springs primarily through pools, architecture or nightlife. Downtown businesses can benefit from a festival that encourages movement through the city.
The city also gains something less tangible but valuable: a chance to reinforce Palm Springs as a cultural hub with more depth than its postcard image.
That is the message Bernstein and other supporters are trying to elevate. Palm Springs is small by population, but its cultural infrastructure is unusually dense. The combination of museums, galleries, theaters, film festivals, music venues, architecture tours and LGBTQ+ cultural life gives the city a profile that many larger cities would struggle to match.
The first year of XOXO Palm Springs will test whether that inventory can be converted into a repeatable annual festival.
For now, the event offers a clear statement of ambition. Palm Springs is not waiting for the high season to tell its story. It is taking the heat of June and turning it into a stage.
And if the experiment works, XOXO Palm Springs could become more than a new item on the calendar. It could become the city’s next signature cultural season.
