City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man

Dedicated to community, art, self-expression and self-reliance, the gathering known around the world as Burning Man now brings together more than 70,000 people annually to create a temporary metropolis in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For the first time, historical materials drawn from the personal archives of Burning Man’s founders—including Harley Dubois, Marian Goodell, Larry Harvey, Will Roger Peterson, Crimson Rose, and Michael Mikel—will be on view in the exhibition, City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man, which will relate the remarkable story of how Burning Man came to be and what its future might hold. Many of the items on view are drawn from the permanent collection of the Burning Man Archives, housed by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Through historical photographs, artifacts, journals, sketches, and notebooks, City of Dust traces the humble countercultural roots of the annual gathering from its early days on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in the late 1980s and its Nevada desert relocation in 1990, to the maturation of the gathering through the application of civic design principles over the next two decades. The exhibition concludes with materials related to Burning Man’s next phase of growth, including the acquisition of Fly Ranch, a 3,800-acre parcel of land located adjacent to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. A thirty-minute interpretive video will be produced to further elucidate the materials on display in the exhibition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website