Join SAAM, five of the original founders of Burning Man, artists from No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man, and other Burners for a day of storytelling, short films, and discussions about the history of the event and the important role of art in its culture. For more information, please visit the Cultural Tourism DC Calendar.
By clicking the image below, you will be cued to Will Roger’s Q&A with Megan Miller of Burning Man, as well as many other notable speakers.
Commissioned art Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti for No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. Image by Brightest Young Things
The Renwick Gallery might look like your classic, 1800s Smithsonian style building, but it’s a transformative space. Walking through the dimly lit dollhouses of Murder Is Her Hobby, the rooms feel much smaller and more intimate. As you crouch and press your face against the glass, it almost seems as if the ceilings have sunken lower. The gallery’s newest exhibition, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, has the opposite effect. These pieces tower far above you and almost touch the ceiling. Every piece fills the room to the brim, making full use of the space and playing off of the Renwick’s classic architecture.
“We have this incredible platform of a 1860’s building in this East Coast Smithsonian museum,” said Nora Atkinson, who works as the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the museum. This juxtaposition between the old school disposition of the Smithsonian and the wild ephemeral nature of Burning Man is at the heart of the exhibit. Atkinson and her team have worked hard to strike a balance between the two. “[We’re] able to say that this artwork is worthy of being here, while still trying to transport people to the desert,” she explained, “because it’s so important to understand the desert to understand the art, so I think we’re doing a combination of things.” > Brightest Young Things, Read More
Shortly after Nora Atkinson was hired in 2014 as a crafts curator at the Renwick Gallery, she pitched a crazy idea — an exhibition dedicated to the art of Burning Man, the late-summer gathering of anarchic spirits in the Nevada desert that culminates in the incineration of a giant, wooden effigy of a man. The week-long Burning Man isn’t technically an art or craft fair, and Atkinson struggled to make a case for the show, an odd fit in buttoned-down Washington, the seat of bureaucracy and government power. But eventually, her boss, Elizabeth Broun, then the Renwick director, responded: “I don’t really know what this is, but I can tell it’s going to be interesting.”
That’s an understatement. > Washington Post, Read More
MARCH 30, 2018 - JANUARY 21, 2019 (FIRST FLOOR CLOSING SEPTEMBER 16, 2018)
Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW)
Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 75,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, enormous experimental art installations are erected and many are ritually burned to the ground. The thriving temporary metropolis known as Burning Man is a hotbed of artistic ingenuity, driving innovation through its principles of radical self-expression, decommodification, communal participation, and reverence for the handmade. Both a cultural movement and an annual event, Burning Man remains one of the most influential phenomenons in contemporary American art and culture.
No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man brings the large-scale, participatory work from this desert gathering to the nation’s capital for the first time. The exhibition takes over the entire Renwick Gallery building, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement. Immersive room-sized installations, costumes, jewelry, and ephemera transport visitors to the gathering’s famed “Playa,” while photographs and archival materials from the Nevada Museum of Art trace Burning Man’s growth and its bohemian roots.
In addition to the in-gallery presentation, the Renwick is expanding beyond its walls for the first time through an outdoor extension of the exhibition entitled No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick, displaying sculptures from Burning Man throughout the surrounding neighborhood in partnership with DC’s Golden Triangle Business Improvement District (BID).
Large-scale installations—the artistic hallmark of Burning Man—form the core of the exhibition. Individual artists and collectives featured in No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man include David Best, Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Duane Flatmo, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Five Ton Crane Arts Collective, FoldHaus Art Collective, Scott Froschauer, HYBYCOZO (Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu), Android Jones, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Christopher Schardt, Richard Wilks, and Leo Villareal. Multiple installation sites have been selected throughout the neighborhood surrounding the museum for No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick, which will include works by Jack Champion, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, HYBYCOZO, Laura Kimpton, Mischell Riley, and Kate Raudenbush. > Read More, Smithsonian American Museum of Art
FoldHaus, Shrumen Lumen, 2016. Photo by Rene Smith
If you start talking about an event that takes place about 100 miles northeast of Reno in the desert in late August, most people in our area, and beyond, will know immediately that you’re talking about Burning Man.
Burning Man has become a cultural institution worthy of a museum exhibition. “City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man” runs from July 1 to January 7 and then in the spring of 2018 it will travel to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno traces the history of Burning Man from its modest San Francisco origins to a yearly event that attracts tens of thousands of people to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
“The genesis of this exhibition really began about four years ago when our Center for Art and Environment, which is the research arm of the museum, acquired a major archive of materials related to the history of Burning Man,” said Ann Wolf, John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director of the Nevada Museum of Art. > Read More, Fred Wasser of KNPR
The Founders of Burning Man
Walking into the Nevada Museum of Art's newest exhibition is like walking into a Burning Man time capsule.
A pair of dusty boots. A 1986 sketch of the man. Several jars of ash and melted glass collected from torched effigies over the years.
City of Dust, open to the public from July 1 through Jan. 7, 2018, is a more than 300-piece collection of Burning Man relics, just a sliver of the more than 6,000 items that the museum has collected for its Burning Man archive at the Center for Art and Environment in Reno.
After the exhibition's debut in Reno, it will travel to the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in spring 2018.
The exhibition traces the more than three-decade evolution of an event that has morphed from a bohemian beach gathering in San Francisco in 1986 to the modern-day 68,000-person pop-up city in Northern Nevada's Black Rock Desert each year.
Burning Man celebrated 30 years since its birth last year, and this year's event is on the horizon, planned for Aug. 27 to Sept. 4. > Read More
Featured Image: Richard Misrach's photograph, Desert Croquet [#3 (Balls/Plane/Car], 1987 (Photo: Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Gift of Michael Light)
For the first time ever, explore the remarkable story of how the legendary Nevada gathering known as Burning Man evolved from humble countercultural roots on San Francisco’s Baker Beach into the world-famous desert convergence it is today. Burning Man’s founders open their vaults to share never-before-seen photographs, artifacts, journals, sketches, and notebooks revealing how this temporary experimental desert city came to be—and how it continues to evolve.
This exhibition is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art. Many of the items included are drawn from the archive collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
City of Dust will travel to the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum in spring 2018. > Read More