"Anyone who hasn’t been to Palm Desert in 10 years is going to be surprised by the current gallery scene," says Melissa Morgan-Nauert, founder of Modern Masters Fine Art gallery, or MMFA as locals call it. Up until the early 1990s Palm Desert’s art scene consisted mainly of kitsch, of coyotes howling at the moon and such, but things changed in 1992 when Leisa Austin and her husband, David, opened Imago Galleries, originally in downtown Palm Springs, and began representing major American artists, with an emphasis on important contemporary California artists such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Graham, Ed Moses and William Wegman.

"David and I were fortunate when we opened to have the support of so many Palm Springs Art Museum patrons," recalls Leisa. "We were also fortunate in the artists who gambled on the desert with us, many of whom we still represent today. Back then, if you were a serious art collector but living in the desert, you bought your art in New York or Chicago. That’s no longer true. Now there are any number of good galleries available to serious collectors."

Most, but not all, of those galleries are sprinkled along Palm Desert’s El Paseo, a chic shopping district 30 minutes east of Palm Springs, chockablock with stylish boutiques and expensive jewelry stores, that is often referred to as the "Rodeo Drive of the Desert." That’s where, in 1994, the Austins moved Imago into a rather modest space, though they’ve since built a dramatic 18,000-square-foot gallery just off El Paseo; its most prominent feature is a massive Dale Chihuly glass sculpture, visable from the street, that hangs suspended in a glassed-enclosed corner of the gallery.

Another important addition to Palm Desert was when Barrie Mowatt, an established gallery owner in Vancouver with a global reputation for showcasing contemporary artists such as Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova, Robert Indiana, Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell and Tom Wesselmann opened a second Buschlen Mowatt gallery in Palm Desert six years ago.

"The desert is a young market, on the cusp of becoming a significant cultural center on par with places like Palm Beach," says Mowatt. "And when you realize that 22 percent of America’s wealth resides in Southern California, and a good percentage of that resides in the desert, you understand why the fine art scene is exploding here."

With Imago and Buschlen Mowatt acting as bookends, the art scene truly began to blossom. The presence of these galleries was one of the reasons Morgan-Nauert decided to open MMFA several years ago. The 5,000-square-foot gallery originally sold mostly lithographs and works on paper by artists like Marc Chagall and Joan Miró, but it shifted gears this year to focus on contemporary realism with exhibitions by Dan Griggs and Michael Sokolis, as well as such abstract artists as Gabriel Rivera and Andy Moses.

"We’ve noticed a shift in the art scene," says Morgan. "The Palm Springs Art Museum, which has a very strong new director in Steven Nash, has been an engine for bringing a change towards contemporary artists."