How Can We Put Burning Man Culture in a Museum?

This is the second post in a series about “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man,” the upcoming exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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I am so excited that Burning Man is going to be at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery for an exhibition of the culture, community, and most especially the art of Burning Man. It’s slated to open March 30, 2018. I have had the rare opportunity to work in the background getting ready for the exhibition. This is the most fabulous job I have had as a volunteer, which is funny since what I am actually doing is follow-up and spreadsheets.

My first task was to think about what the curator for this exhibition, Nora Atkinson, Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Renwick Gallery, might like to see. Burning Man’s Civic Arts team prepared a long list of artists and took Nora on studio visits all over Northern California (stay tuned for a future post about this! — ed.), so I knew she had some background coming into this conversation. There is the art, there is the culture and community, but what I wanted to share with her was the breadth of material culture, so when she made her choices for the exhibition, she would be aware of the many options available. You know, all the gifts, a collection of patches/badges, pins, calendars, jewelry, and t-shirts collected over 17 years. So at home I pulled out every piece of Burning Man material culture I could find, which was quite a process. I felt like I gave her a visual understanding of what she might see in Black Rock City.

I think Burning Man material culture belongs in a museum because it reflects our fundamental value of Gifting. Gifting gives Burning Man participants a chance to interact, and that builds community, and we carry that experience home to the real world. My first Burning Man friend, a graphic artist, let me use his art to make t-shirt transfers for San Francisco Decompression in 2000. He is coming over today to help move some couches. And that is how community is built from the exchange of material culture. I think any display of Burning Man artifacts worth its weight in playa dust has to reflect that value.

I am also helping to catalog and date a necklace for the exhibit that is a collection of pendants and charms. So here I am, documenting artists, jewelers, and dates. Very fun and exciting, and yes, of course it all goes in a spreadsheet.

And then as a treat for me, I went to visit artist Michael Garlington — his partner, Natalia Bertotti, was not at the studio that day — and see the piece they are creating for the exhibition. I peeked into the piece’s shadow boxes, and this one was my favorite, “Two for Sea.”

I had no idea that the scope of this work was so amazing! It is going to be incredible to get to see it in a museum. I am excited to see so much big art — some of which has been commissioned for the exhibition, and some that will be familiar to BRC citizens — in a contained space. It will be a different sort of experience to see all these pieces that we would have to bike out to on the playa underneath a roof. I’m sure they will relate to each other in a way we have never encountered before.

I have had a lot of volunteer jobs in my 17 years at Burning Man. I am currently on the Volunteer Leadership Council, have been the wedding coordinator, the training coordinator, the social media coordinator for the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and have written over 90 blog posts for the Burning Man Journal, but I think this is the pièce de résistance as volunteer jobs go.

If you want to know more about the exhibition and the curator, check out the kickoff post in this series, an interview with Nora Atkinson.

Now back to work, and I hope to see you at the Renwick!

Top photo: Portal for the exhibition by Natalia Bertotti and Michael Garlington, photo by Michael Garlington