Exhibit born in harsh Black Rock Desert
January 5, 2009
By Jim Feehan
The annual artistic expression camp in the desert of Nevada (left), will be displayed beginning Jan. 9 with others at the UP Front gallery.
Exhibit born in harsh Black Rock Desert
Take hundreds of artists, put them in the middle of a Nevada desert in August and you have Burning Man.
The name has nothing to do with immolation or the sunburn some of the artisans experience from the 110-degree heat in the Black Rock Desert, 120 miles north of Reno.
Burning Man, an annual temporary community, is the world’s largest outdoor art gallery. For one week each year, participants gather to create a community based on self-expression, sharing, self-reliance, and the creation of art without judgment and competition, said Karen Abel, executive director of artEAST. About 15 local artists, who have exhibited at artEAST in the past, will showcase their works from last year’s Burning Man.
“I think this exhibit is really a celebration of the art and energy of the community,” Abel said.
The artists lived in tents and shared their temporary residence with other artists from New Zealand, the Netherlands and Ireland. Their camp was encircled by 100 feet of blank canvas on which artists shared their talent. “Burners,” as Burning Man attendees are known, incorporated an ecofriendly ethos departing the desert, leaving no trace of having been there, Abel said.
“This is the Woodstock of visual arts,” she said.
Burning Man started in 1986, when a few friends gathered on a beach in San Francisco and spontaneously burned an 8-foot effigy of a man, engaging, as the Burning Man Web site says, “in the first recorded form of ‘radical self-expression.’”
Year after year, the semispontaneous act grew into an annual rite, eventually moving to the Nevada desert for a weeklong event. Last year’s event drew about 50,000 participants.
If you go
‘Burning Man’ exhibit
Opening reception
5-9 p.m. Jan. 9
UP Front
48 Front St. N.
www.arteast.org
The exhibit of 35 collective works from Burning Man is on display through Jan. 31.
Reach Reporter Jim Feehan at 392-6434, ext. 239, or jfeehan@isspress.com. Comment on this story at www.issquahpress.com.
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