Nigerian artist Olalekan Jeyifous builds 50ft sculpture at music festival

The 2017 edition

The annual event started on Friday, April 14, 2017, and will end on Sunday, April 23, 2017. Coachella has made headlines because of performances by Lady Gaga, Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

What should also be making headlines is a 50ft sculpture that was made by Nigerian artist Olalekan Jeyifous who is based in Brooklyn but was partly raised in Ile-Ife.

The sculpture is called 'Crown Ether'. The sculpture explores the "relationship of the terrestrial to the sublime" Jeyifous said on the Coachella website.

He further describes his sculpture as "like a coming together of people around the music and the arts."

Olalekan Jeyifous also known as Lek is an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and in the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts.

In 2016, Olalekan Jeyifous created his own version of shanty towns in Lagos. His designs were called 'Shanty Megastructures' and meant to highlight the low standards of living in these places.

The designs re-imagine these shanty towns into high-rise buildings and towers that look very sci-fi.

"These images juxtapose sites of privileged and much-coveted real estate throughout Lagos, Nigeria, with colossal vertical settlements representing marginalised and impoverished communities," Olalekan Jeyifous told the website Dezeen.

"The dispossessed are given prominence and visibility, albeit through a somewhat dystopian vision, which highlights that these communities often suffer from a lack of appropriate sanitation, electricity, medical services, and modern communications" he further said.