DC -- Renwick Gallery -- Press Preview: No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man:
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Description of Pictures: Press preview for the exhibitions “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” and “No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick”
Speakers:
* Stephanie Stebich, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
* Kim Cook, Director of Art & Civic Engagement, Burning Man Project
* Leona Agouridis, Executive Director, Golden Triangle Business Improvement District
* Nora Atkinson, The Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 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” transports the large-scale 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 Burning Man through immersive room-sized installations, costumes, jewelry and ephemera. “No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick” extends the exhibition beyond the museum’s walls, displaying sculptures from Burning Man throughout the surrounding neighborhood in partnership with Washington’s Golden Triangle Business Improvement District (BID).
Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, organized the exhibition in collaboration with the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization responsible for producing the annual Burning Man event in Black Rock City.
Artists here include: Marco Cochrane ("Truth is Beauty"), Kate Raudenbush ( ...More...
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2018_DC_SIRG_Burning_BOD_180330: DC -- Renwick Gallery -- Opening Day: No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick Walking Tour (103 photos from 2018)
2018_DC_SIRG_Burning_AOD_180330: DC -- Renwick Gallery -- Opening Day: No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man (40 photos from 2018)
2018_DC_SIRG_Burning_BPP_180329: DC -- Renwick Gallery -- Press Preview: No Spectators: Beyond the Renwick Walking Tour (94 photos from 2018)
2018_DC_SIRG_Burning_APP_180329: DC -- Renwick Gallery -- Press Preview: No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man (91 photos from 2018)
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BURNPA_180329_017.JPG: Marco Cochrane's Truth is Beauty @ No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man @ Renwick Gallery
In 2007, Marco Cochrane's first trip to Burning Man inspired him to enlarge his work to monumental proportions. Together with his wife and partner, Julia Whitelaw, and with the help of dozens of volunteers (the Bliss Crew), he embarked on a series of three colossal sculptures of singer and dancer Deja Solis for the playa -- Bliss Dance (2010), Truth is Beauty (2013), and R-Evolution (2015), collectively known as The Bliss Project. For each sculpture, Solis chose her own pose and expression. Haunted by the abduction and sexual assault of a childhood friend, Cochrane intends the project to bring attention to the issue of violence against women, demystifying the female body and portraying the "feminine energy and power that results when women feel free and safe." Around the base of the Truth is Beauty installation this question appears in multiple languages: "What Would The World Be Like If Women Were Safe?"
Cochrane first sculpts his pieces by hand before constructing them from steel triangles at grand proportions. Built using a mold of the original clay sculpture, the version of Truth Is Beauty in the gallery is one-third the size of the fifty-five-foot tall figure that appeared at Burning Man in 2013.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
BURNPA_180329_025.JPG: Kate Raudenbush and Mischell Riley
Kate Raudenbush's Future's Past
Meet the Artists of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Kate Raudenbush is a self-taught, Burning Man–bred sculptor, known for her large-scale, geometric works. Her immersive, experiential environments are spaces for exploration, human connection, and intellectual curiosity. Informed by a range of cultures, symbols, and myths, these otherworldly -- even sacred–works serve as allegories for social and environmental concerns.
Visitors to Raudenbush's Future's Past encounter a temple to technology, abandoned and consumed by nature. Referencing both the roots of trees and computer circuitry, this modern ruin is a meditation on technology and the environment's vital role in our survival. The black pyramid evokes a Mayan temple, an homage to a collapsed culture and a reminder of the frailty of our own, while the tree alludes to the vegetation around Angkor temples and the sacred Bodhi, the fig tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. An hourglass inside the altar signals the urgency of our current technological evolution.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
BURNPA_180329_034.JPG: Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson
BURNPA_180329_038.JPG: Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti's Paper Arch
Meet the Artists of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Since 2013, Michael Garlington and his partner, Natalia Bertotti, have teamed up to create large-scale installations based on religious structures, incorporating Garlington's elaborately framed, signature photographs, which explore the range of human experience between "the horror and the wonder," the two extremes of being. Two of these -- Photo Chapel (2013) and Totem of Confessions (2015) -- were created for Burning Man and burned at the conclusion of the event. Though influenced by David Best's temples, one of which Garlington helped build, these installations are meant as places of raucousness and whimsy rather than solemnity and silence.
Paper Arch, commissioned specifically for the Renwick, expands the pair's canon into secular architecture and evokes the symbolic threshold participants cross as they enter Burning Man. Exploding into a plume of paper flames that rises to the ceiling, the piece also suggests the ritual conclusion of the weeklong event and calls attention to the sculpture's ephemeral nature.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
BURNPA_180329_046.JPG: Michael Garlington, ???
BURNPA_180329_062.JPG: Kate Raudenbush, Marco Cochrane, ???
BURNPA_180329_069.JPG: Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson
BURNPA_180329_071.JPG: Richard Wilks
BURNPA_180329_075.JPG: Stephanie Stebich, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
BURNPA_180329_151.JPG: ???
BURNPA_180329_170.JPG: Kim Cook, Director of Art & Civic Engagement, Burning Man Project
BURNPA_180329_179.JPG: ???, ???
BURNPA_180329_261.JPG: Leona Agouridis, Executive Director, Golden Triangle Business Improvement District
BURNPA_180329_268.JPG: ???, ???
BURNPA_180329_317.JPG: Nora Atkinson, The Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
BURNPA_180329_417.JPG: ???, ???
BURNPA_180329_418.JPG: ???
BURNPA_180329_429.JPG: Richard Wilks' Evotrope
Meet the Artists of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Evotrope, a giant mobile zoetrope, is just one of several imaginative vehicles Richard Wilks has designed for Burning Man, working primarily with steel and aluminum and using a combination of physical and digital tools. Participants animate the artwork using the hand-crank and, in the dark of night, strobing lights bring the spinning images to life.
A Los Angeles–based artist, graphic designer, and builder/maker, Wilks received his B.F.A. in 1988 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, then got his start with Walt Disney Imagineering, conceptualizing environments for theme parks. Today, he works as a creative hybrid: artist, graphic designer, builder/maker, inventor, and seeker. A sense of connection to the natural world inspires him, and he often focuses on environmental themes, which he translates with a distinctively human touch influenced by Burning Man, the maker movement, and 1970s bike culture.
Beyond Burning Man, Wilks has exhibited his mobile art sculptures at museums, galleries, and art fairs in California and New York. His Cupcake Car, which appeared on the 2015 season premiere of The Bachelorette, has proven particularly popular both on and off the playa.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
BURNPA_180329_438.JPG: User comment: Duane Flatmo
BURNPA_180329_442.JPG: Duane Flatmo's Tin Pan Dragon
Meet the Artists of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Duane Flatmo built his first kinetic sculpture in 1982 for the Grand Championship Kinetic Sculpture Race, an annual event in which human-powered art sculptures race for three days and forty-two miles over land, water, and sand from the city of Arcata to Ferndale, California. With longtime friend Jerry Kunkel, Flatmo has since created more than thirty-three mutant vehicles, usually from recycled scrap metal and other found objects, including several entries for Burning Man. His unusual tinkering has also garnered attention in television and film: in 2001 he and his team, Art Attack, competed on the series Junkyard Wars. In 2006, he became a finalist on America's Got Talent, playing a guitar with an eggbeater, then a weed whacker.
The pedal-powered Tin Pan Dragon (2008) was the first contraption Flatmo brought to Burning Man, and led to more grandiose works. In La Penita, Mexico, a show at a local art gallery inspired Flatmo to create the three-foot prototype for El Pulpo Mecanico (2011), a giant, flame-blowing octopus that would become one of the most beloved mutant vehicles ever on playa. After bringing it to Black Rock City for six years, Flatmo then mined the vehicle for parts for his most recent creation, Rabid Transit, which debuted at Burning Man in 2017.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
BURNPA_180329_446.JPG: ???
BURNPA_180329_450.JPG: ???, ???
BURNPA_180329_453.JPG: David Best's Temple
Meet the Artists of No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
Since 2000, David Best has designed and coordinated the construction of approximately half of the Burning Man temples. Established as sacred spaces of reflection and prayer, all of these have been massive, incredibly intricate, wooden structures. During the week of Burning Man, the Temples are adorned by participants with memorials and inscriptions. The structure is burned in a cathartic ritual to inspire healing and community. Since 2005, Best has also built similarly ephemeral temples in public spaces outside of Burning Man, within the United States and in countries such as Ireland and Nepal. Committed to the values of inclusion and participation, he creates opportunities for anyone who wants to take part in his projects, augmenting a core group of volunteers known as the Temple Crew with members of each community where he works.
Best received a B.F.A. from the College of Marin and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute; his paintings, sculptures, collages, art cars, and ceramics can be found in many distinguished public and private collections. He is, however, best-known as the Temple Builder at Burning Man.
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 and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.
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Description of Subject Matter: No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man
March 30, 2018 – January 21, 2019
The exhibition takes over the entire Renwick Gallery building, bringing alive the maker culture of Burning Man through artworks, room-sized installations, jewelry, costumes, and ephemera that will transport visitors to the gathering’s famed desert location, the “playa.” Immersive works by individual artists and collectives highlight the ingenuity and creative spirit of this cultural movement. Photographs and archival documents drawn from the Burning Man Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art and their exhibition City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man will trace Burning Man’s growth and its bohemian, counterculture roots.
PLEASE NOTE: THE EXHIBITION WILL CLOSE IN TWO PHASES
The first floor galleries will be open through September 16, 2018. This includes works by Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Duane Flatmo, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Five Ton Crane Arts Collective, Scott Froschauer, Android Jones, and Richard Wilks.
The second floor galleries will be open through January 21, 2019. This includes works by David Best, FoldHaus Art Collective, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, HYBYCOZO (Yelena Filipchuk and Serge Beaulieu), Christopher Schardt, and Leo Villareal.
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2018 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Trips this year:
Civil War Trust conferences in Greenville, NC, Newport News, VA, and my farewell event with them in Chicago, IL (via sites in Louisville, KY, St. Louis, MO, and Toledo, OH),
three trips to New York City (including New York Comic-Con), and
my 13th consecutive trip to San Diego Comic-Con (including sites in Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles).
Number of photos taken this year: about 535,000.
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