Music credit: “Day Ride” written and performed by Rob Frye from the cd Flux Bikes.

Nora Atkinson: I love the confidence of the art of Burning Man that is we’re going to burn it all down and we’re going to do it again next year. I think it’s not an accident that this is coming directly out of San Francisco, Silicon Valley area. This is a humanistic response to the time period that we live in and it sort of balances that feeling of technology. It’s incorporating the technology. It’s not reacting against it; it’s more like something that’s happening synchronous to it.

Jo Reed: That’s Nora Atkinson, she is the curator of the exhibit No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. It's at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and this is Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

When many people think of Burning Man—what comes to mind is a yearly Bacchanalia that takes place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. And truth be told, there is some of that going on but Burning Man is also an important cultural event that draws 70,000 people and invites them to create the world they want to live in. For that week on the playa, no money changes hands, things aren’t even bartered, they’re shared. Radical self-expression and participation are two of its principles as is the injunction: Leave no trace. Art is central to this vision—it’s always been part of the festival’s DNA. Massive large-scale installations are created in the desert—intricately constructed, most of it interactive and playful. People are encouraged to touch, to add to it, they’re often necessary to activate the sculpture so it can be experienced in all its glory. And at the week’s end, many of the installations are ritually burned. So then how then is it possible to bring not just the art but some of the experience of Burning Man out of the desert into a Washington, D.C. museum? That’s the task Nora Atkinson, the Renwick Gallery’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, set for herself when she proposed the exhibit No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. And let me cut to the chase. It is spectacular, a visual wonder taking over the entire museum and spilling out into the streets of D.C. I was mesmerized by the exhibit, but it left me with questions that I was able to put to Nora Atkinson, beginning with the one I kept asking myself over and over.

I'm going to get to the main event here, which is: Burning Man is an annual event. It takes place in the desert over ten days and it’s guided by several principles including participation, self-expression, decommodification and most important leave no trace.

Nora Atkinson: Right.

Jo Reed: How do you take art that’s created under the umbrella of these principles for a particular place that’s usually destroyed at the event’s end and move it into a museum without losing something essential about the work?

Nora Atkinson: Yeah. It’s a really interesting question, something that I’ve been mulling over for a lot of years, but as I started to think more and more about the ideas of what the artwork was about at Burning Man and particularly from my area of study, which is contemporary modern craft, it really made a lot of sense because craft as we think of it today really is all about the materiality and the process of the work. And by Burning Man’s art being so much about place and time and being in that moment, the art really becomes very much about the process and the collaboration of making the work as much as it is about the finished product, which only lasts for a very short time period. So it really got me thinking about the contemporary period, our modern industrial revolution, the digital age in parallel to the beginnings of modern craft, which we think of as the original industrial revolution when people’s jobs were being mechanized and people were concerned that they were going to lose that part of the human spirit that is so associated with individual creation.

Jo Reed: Nora you had—if I’ve read my research correctly—the idea for this exhibit, No Spectators, years before you actually went to Burning Man.

Nora Atkinson: That’s right.

Jo Reed: Tell me why. What was inflaming your imagination about this?

Nora Atkinson: You know, I have known about Burning Man forever. Burning Man started in 1986. It’s a West Coast phenomenon. I’m from Seattle and so I think my friends started to go around 2000 and for years they were telling me about the phenomenal art but I wasn’t paying that much attention. In around 2010, I started working on an exhibition about healing through art, and one of the artists at the time that I started to get heavily interested in was David Best who builds the temples at Burning Man. So I couldn’t think of any way to work David Best’s work into any kind of museum exhibition because his pieces get burned within a week of being built but it was the seed of this idea that started to come into my head, how could you actually do an exhibition of Burning Man art, and so over the years have become more and more fascinated with the large-scale installations as well as the smaller expressions, the jewelry and costume coming out of the desert.

Jo Reed: With Burning Man and the pieces that you chose to bring into the Renwick—and it’s a monumental exhibit; the museum is entirely devoted to this—tell me how you went about choosing what pieces not only would represent Burning Man but would best represent Burning Man within that museum, within that closed space as opposed to being out in the desert.

Nora Atkinson: Yes, a really interesting process because this is the first major museum exhibition of this kind of work. I felt very responsible to the community—the Burning Man community to make sure that they were represented the way that they would like to be seen. I wanted this to have that same spirit and when people are making art for Burning Man there is a broad variety. One of the characteristics of the work there is that any person who makes work can show it as long as they check the work in and it’s secured down on the playa and it’s illuminated at night. So many people who are MFAs who have this longstanding background in the arts create work and many people who’ve never done work before in their lives create it and it creates a really embracing, broad culture of experimentation and collaboration that goes on there. So in choosing the artworks, and I did a lot of homework in advance, a lot of research on nature pieces, artists that continued to make year after year so I had a core group of artists that I wanted to represent. And then I reached out to the Burning Man organization, which is a nonprofit, more than a hundred people year ‘round that work on this event and regional events around the world, and they were instrumental in helping me reach out to artists, go on studio visits. The artistic community is very collaborative so each artist would say, “If you like my work, here are three other people that I admire.” We reached out to the Burning Man community through the Burning Man organization’s newsletter to ask them what artists inspired them and so we had a whole call-out of works that were sent to us that we culled through as well, and then from that I had to select pieces that I could fit through the front door of the building—

Jo Reed: I was going to say—

Nora Atkinson: —and so it was a really—puzzle to put together. I did commission several artworks because there were artists that I wanted to include who burn all of their work in playa and there’s nothing left to show so we commissioned several things specifically for the exhibition. Some pieces couldn’t fit through the front door so we put together a collaboration with our local business-improvement district and they placed six sculptures out in the neighborhood so those things that we couldn’t get in we could place around still. And it’s remarkable to see the stuff in the museum because the desert is such an empty, vast plain, this beautiful tabula rasa that defies scale, and when you place those into this building which—we have, thank goodness, grand soaring ceilings these pieces that were tiny on playa become massive sculptures in the museum. And it’s wonderful to see the way they play with that architecture to see that some of these pieces really do hold up in this completely alternate context.

Jo Reed: What works did you commission for No Spectators?

Nora Atkinson: So there are four works that we commissioned for the museum. One of the works is by Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti called Paper Arch and they do burn their pieces on playa each year. It’s a layered paper triumphal arch that’s built out of three-dimensionally collaged photographs on wood with peephole elements in four different spots on it.

Jo Reed: And that’s the way in fact we enter, through that arch; that’s how the exhibit begins.

Nora Atkinson: That’s right. At Burning Man, you need a threshold so you enter another alternate reality and I asked Michael and Natalia if they could build me that and they gave me something that is quite beautiful, definitely in line with the other works that they’ve created but also a response to D.C., which I love.

Jo Reed: It’s a wonderful way to enter that exhibit. What else did you commission?

Nora Atkinson: We commissioned a mutant vehicle from an artist collective called Five Ton Crane. Five Ton Crane is just a fabulous group of artists, more than 80 artists at any given time, pretty much the requirement to be one of the artists involved in the group is you show up and work and you show up again and then you’re part of the group and you bring whatever skills you bring, and they’ve done lots of these imaginative, immersive worlds over the years. They’ve done a fairy-tale home inside a giant boot that has all these Mother Goose sort of references to it, lots of mutant vehicles and—

Jo Reed: I think you need to describe what a mutant vehicle is.

Nora Atkinson: Oh, I probably do. So ‘round about 1996, the folks in charge of Burning Man decided to ban cars on playa; it was getting a little bit dangerous and so they started to require that any vehicle-—any motor-powered vehicle be registered with the DMV, the Department of Mutant Vehicles, to get a license. And so a mutant vehicle is a vehicle that has been more than 50 percent converted from being a regular car in some imaginative way, it has to be participatory, can’t go more than five miles per hour while it’s on playa, it needs to be lit up, and so all of these sort of outrageous vehicles from giant steampunk snails to disco fish to a Pac-Man ghost are running around all over the desert. In any event, most of the mutant vehicles are much too big to fit through our front doors, and I very much wanted to work with Five Ton Crane and I reached out and they gave me several proposals for work because they didn’t have anything available. And one of their proposals was this mutant vehicle that was called Capitol Theater that was made on the basis of a double-decker bus and it’s a theater that is set in the 1930s. It has three custom films. You can go up into it. They have fake candy for sale, they have period newspapers because, and I contacted them instantly back and I said, “If you can build this in segments so we can get it through the front door, keep the weight pretty low because we have weight limits then I’m all in.” So that piece was commissioned and that piece will eventually go out to playa after the exhibition is done.

Jo Reed: It’s a wonderful, wonderful piece, so much fun. I sat in it and watched one of the silent movies which was a blast. You also have an interactive virtual reality experience at Burning Man.

Nora Atkinson: Yes We commissioned a virtual reality deep playa experience and that was from an artist named Andrew “Android” Jones who is a digital painter who works—he’s been going out to Burning Man since I think around 2003. He actually paints en plein air at Burning Man some of the time using his Wacom tablet, which is pretty interesting, and he—there’s a little bit of a meta element to us having this virtual reality. It not only is an expression of what it’s like to be out on playa but Android Jones at his camp at Burning Man does do virtual-reality experiences so if you were at Burning Man you could go use one of these virtual-reality experiences. You know, Burning Man is a very tech-heavy environment and there is this seamless transition between the handmade and the digital there that goes on and that is one of the things that I really wanted people to understand and things that I wanted to bring out in the show.

Jo Reed: And then The Temple I would imagine.

Nora Atkinson: And then The Temple.

Jo Reed: And that’s by David Best.

Nora Atkinson: Right.

Jo Reed: In a show that has spectacular pieces, it is one of the spectacular pieces.

Nora Atkinson: It’s a show-stopper—

Jo Reed: Yeah, it is.

Nora Atkinson: —and it was again the reason that I—one of the reasons that I really wanted to do this exhibition to begin with was to work with David Best. He built his first temple in 2000 with Jack Haye. It was not intended to be a temple but during the course of building this large-scale sculpture which they were building with the remnants from—there was a toy dinosaur puzzle factory that was right next to his studio so they had all these wonderful lacy wood remnants that they were gathering and using. And he had a boy on his crew that he was very close to who left his studio one night and tragically was killed in a motorcycle accident and it was not long before Burning Man and so he and the rest of his crew weren’t sure if they were going to build this thing or not. And they eventually decided that they were going out into the desert and building it for this member of their team and when they brought it out there it became a makeshift memorial and the whole Burning Man community began to leave these testaments to loss and to memorialize this tragedy. And there was sort of a realization at that point that Burning Man needed that kind of spiritual center so every year since then a temple has been built and David’s built about half of those so far. And they spend the whole year working on these and about a month typically with maybe 50 people out in the desert building massive structures several stories tall a lot of the time that last for a week and then they’re burned with all of those mementoes inside of them as this kind of cathartic release at the end of the event.

Jo Reed: That’s burned on the last night.

Nora Atkinson: It’s burned on Sunday. So most of the time Burning Man participants show up on a Monday; they stay through the week; The Man burns on Saturday; The Temple burns on Sunday.

Jo Reed: I know this is a hard thing to ask but can you describe that temple for us?

Nora Atkinson: Our temple. David brings together influences from temples and sacred spaces all throughout the world. You see influences of Catholic churches and you see Buddhist temples and you see some Thai and it’s not one particular culture. I think everybody who walks in kind of picks out elements that resonate with them and some of these have been very imaginative and based on the materials that he uses so some of them are more straight lines; others are more curvy. When we asked him to do this piece instead of asking him to do a full architectural structure we basically had him do a skin for the room so he’s using the architecture of the room as the base for this piece. And as you walk up into the space he’s created this just magnificent chandelier that hangs above with a spire that comes down to-- pointing to the ground and pointing up into the heavens, this very lacy Baltic birch plywood that most of the piece is made of and then some shining elements of gold. And around the edges are pillars with little benches that are also made of these wooden elements put together and certain altars, and people are invited to come in as they would on playa and leave messages to deal with losses that they have experienced, etc., so it is a profoundly spiritual place.

Jo Reed: I can't imagine what it took to create a fully-realized temple in that room. It's a large room but still.

Nora Atkinson: We gave David a difficult parameter for this but he’s just handled it masterfully, and then he comes up with the main plan and his team of about 20 people per day for six days a week for a month that were in the museum constructing each one brings his or her own imagination to the pieces that they’re working on so each piece is largely individual.

Jo Reed: You’ve said, and I agree, that Burning Man is all about human connection at a time when we’ve gone so fully digital and at the same time they’re not luddites.

Nora Atkinson: Right. It’s one of the things that I love about this and, going back to that idea of echoing the craft movement’s beginnings, one of the things I think is so interesting about Burning Man is that this is really the contemporary maker movement and the maker movement is a marriage of handmade techniques and fully cutting-edge technology. It’s using whatever means necessary to produce things individually and so as opposed to the original arts and crafts movement, which was this response that felt as though craft was going to die if we didn’t do something about it. I love the confidence of the art of Burning Man that is we’re going to burn it all down and we’re going to do it again next year because I think it’s not an accident that this is coming directly out of San Francisco, Silicon Valley area. This is a humanistic response to the time period that we live in and it sort of balances that feeling of technology. It’s incorporating the technology. It’s not reacting against it; it’s more like something that’s happening synchronous to it.

Jo Reed: Yeah. It’s insisting on more than a human thumbprint, a human molding of it.

Nora Atkinson: Yeah, and that participatory element of it really brings that together. All of these pieces are about community whether it’s in the collaboration of making them or whether it’s in the invitation to come experience them and many times activating them takes many people to be around so they become a community strike point.

Jo Reed: And that’s exactly what I was going to ask you. Since creating community really is so much at the heart of Burning Man, bringing that into the museum, creating community in the museum through this exhibit, how do you think about that?

Nora Atkinson: Yeah. I think one of the strong points generally of craft that I’ve come to love about it because I came from a contemporary-art background is that craft is a little bit more populist and it really is about not being a secret language but being something that everyone can relate to, and you think of the traditional kinds of craft practice; you’re talking about utilitarian objects. Everybody understands a chair on some basic level and you can have an appreciation for all of those things. So I always take that as the basis and I think at Burning Man of course when you’re experiencing the art there aren’t placards explaining it; you have to go experience it for yourself, take your own meaning. So from the time that we reopened the museum a few years ago with our huge spectacular show, WONDER, and the exhibitions that we’ve put on since, we have been looking for ways that we can break down a little bit of that barrier between the audience and the artworks to invite people to have the confidence in their own intellectual capabilities to really look and see the work and understand it in their own minds I think bringing a really stronger connection to the works and getting together with other people and discussing it.

Jo Reed: Do you feel you've got the Burning Man community on board and supporting this?

Nora Atkinson: When we started this project it was a concern for me that I wanted the community to embrace this and I didn’t know whether some of these things would translate particularly since Burning Man’s probably main principle is decommodification and I wanted to make sure that we were representing them the way they ought to be. And I reached out right away to the Burning Man organization and I explained that we were America’s museum and we wanted to tell this story as part of the American story and that we are free and open to the public every day and so we are living these principles every day. And I did expect there was a potential for a lot more negative feedback from the Burning Man community but in fact Burning Man has grown from being a week-long event every year into something that really is more of a worldwide cultural movement and they have been slowly shifting in that direction. So the Burning Man community has been very embracing of this exhibition as part of that mission to be more about this peaceful outward cultural movement with these principles than something that is just this salacious thing that happens for a week in the desert that the media has portrayed it to be.

Jo Reed: Right. I really have to know when you presented the idea of this exhibit to your colleagues at the Renwick— do tell.

Nora Atkinson: <laughs> Yes. This was a slow project to present. When I moved cross-country from the other Washington to D.C. This was actually one of the first things that I wanted to do at the museum. It really seemed like the right thing partially because I recognized when I moved that it was much less known on the East Coast than it was on the West and there was lot of West Coast culture that wasn’t here that I thought ought to be brought to the museum—admittedly I was a bit homesick at the time—but I just started very simply talking to people, putting this idea out, talked to my colleagues and they had the same reaction that many people have, which is A) “Isn’t it just a bunch of people doing drugs in the desert?” No, it’s not, it’s actually this incredible artistic movement that’s going on, and B) “Doesn’t everything get burned?” Well, that was the harder part. Not everything gets burned, but being able to convince people that we had the artwork to show and we could pull this off. I did find out along the way that sometimes people who are Burners are the people you least expect and so when I presented this as an idea to my director I pointed out several important folks that were supporters of the museum that went and that does change the way you think about something like this. So it was incremental.

Jo Reed: The name of the exhibit is No Spectators.

Nora Atkinson: That’s right, yes. It’s a word play on a lot of levels. It was a motto that people at Burning Man had from the very early years. “No spectators” that meant you need to participate in the artwork, you need to be an active participant, we don’t allow people to come in and day trip and just watch the activity, you’ve got to be involved, and for me that was again a sort of response. When we had our opening exhibition, WONDER, which was such an Instagram hit, I wanted to see if we could push that envelope beyond people just taking pictures and get them to actively involve themselves in the artwork and feel as though they themselves could be artists and create the world that they want to live in, which is what Burning Man is all about. So lots of the artworks invite people to action; they let you write on the chalkboard walls or leave mementoes or you’re able to look in the peepholes or touch the work or go inside.

Jo Reed: Or make the mushrooms with the lights open up.

Nora Atkinson: Or activate the mushrooms, exactly.

Jo Reed: There's a couple of other individual works that I'd like you to talk about. The sculpture that's right on the other side of the archway when we enter the exhibit, it's called Truth is Beauty and it's by Marco Cochrane.

Nora Atkinson: Yes. This piece, Truth is Beauty, is actually one of I think the most iconic images that has come out from Burning Man and the piece we have in the museum is actually a one-third-scale version of the original on playa that was 55 feet tall. And it is a sculpture of a nude woman done in a metal-fabrication technique and she’s dancing; it’s a dancer named Deja Solis that he’s worked with on what he called the Bliss Project. The Bliss Project is three sculptures all of the same dancer, Marco asking her to take the poses that she felt like she would take if women were safe in the world. It’s beautiful, beautiful work.

Jo Reed: It’s so joyous.

Nora Atkinson: It is.

Jo Reed: It was just pure joy—

Nora Atkinson: Yeah.

Jo Reed: — and how often do you see that?

Nora Atkinson: Absolutely.

Jo Reed: And the other that I’d like to talk about, I’m probably going to completely muddle the names so correct me. HYBYCOZO?

Nora Atkinson: That’s right.

Jo Reed: Which has to be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. Describe that.

Nora Atkinson: HYBYCOZO— actually the name comes from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something—

Jo Reed: Why am I not surprised?

Nora Atkinson: Yes. The pair of artists had an affinity for the book and so the first project they brought to playa they called HYBYCOZO, which stood for Hyperspace Bypass Construction Zone which was from the book. Yelena and Serge who are the artists just have a mutual love of geometry and the ways that that has fit into history just in the sciences as well as in architecture and the work really references Islamic architecture and those kind of beautiful forms. So these are huge geometric shapes that cast lights out from inside so they cast these ornate shadows on the walls, the lights in that room subtly shift, and here’s a place where the work in the museum transforms because when it’s out in the desert it’s a very sublime, a meditative space, but the shadows are only being cast on the surface of the playa. And inside the museum these really come to life, casting shadows on the ceiling and the walls all around so you enter this incredible immersive environment.

Jo Reed: Extraordinary. I could have stayed there for hours and hours. No Spectators not only occupies the entire museum, it also extends beyond the museum door. There are pieces that are in the streets of D.C. And First of all, I was really surprised that the Renwick had never done that before.

Nora Atkinson: Yeah. The Renwick literally does not own its front doorstep because we’re on the steps of the White House and it’s all Secret Service and Park Service and all of that so we’ve never had an opportunity to be outdoors whatsoever and it was just serendipity that it happened this time around. We had some fabulous new people working for the Golden Triangle Business Improvement District that were trying to be creative with the artworks that they were putting around and they reached out to us asking if we could help them curate some of the work in the neighborhood and we pitched this idea to them. And we actually between the two of us thought maybe we’ll be able to do two or three sculptures if we work hard at this and they were able to raise funds and locate spaces to place six pieces so an incredible first partnership came just at the right time.

Jo Reed: And some of the pieces change at night.

Nora Atkinson: Yeah, they light up at night as they would on the playa.

Jo Reed: For me I have to say I saw three and I purposely didn’t look for the other three because I really want to stumble on them as I go through the city. That was my gift to me.

Nora Atkinson: It’s sort of a joy.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I would think it will be.

Nora Atkinson: And I’ve never passed them that people aren’t stopped at them reading the labels and checking them out and taking pictures so it’s fun.

Jo Reed: That’s another point for community engagement.

Nora Atkinson: Right, and the museum can sometimes be busy and of course we’re closed at night but these are always accessible, which just adds that extra element.

Jo Reed: The exhibit has been open for about six weeks. I'd like you to talk about the public's reaction to it.

Nora Atkinson: The response has been outstanding. In the first month, we had a little over 130,000 people through the doors so that doesn’t count the sculptures that are outside and that is to put in perspective about almost twice as many people as go to Burning Man each year, and certainly it was our largest first month in history and the just verbal response and the responses from comments have been almost entirely positive. I love going into the galleries because you see two-year-olds and three-year-olds that are just standing in awe of these things and they’re allowed to interact with them, which so many people are often not allowed to do, and then also people all ages. We get a huge rush that happens just after school gets out and we’ve had a lot of people who are older who have always thought "oh, Burning Man’s not something for me" and they have said, “Thank you so much for bringing this here” because there’s so many people that really don’t understand what this is until they come through the museum and it’s just wondrous.

Jo Reed: It is a wonderful, wonderful exhibit—

Nora Atkinson: Thank you.

Jo Reed: —and I enjoyed it greatly and I’m so glad I live in this city so I can keep coming back while it’s here.

Nora Atkinson: Oh, thank you.

Jo Reed: Really Nora, thank you. I appreciate it.

Nora Atkinson: Thank you.

Jo Reed: Thanks.

That’s Nora Atkinson, she is the curator of the exhibit No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man. It's now showing at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It closes in January 2019, so if you’re coming to DC before then, check it out. It is wondrous.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts—so please do and leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.