Book Release | Compass of the Ephemeral

Co-Founder of Burning Man Documents Evolution of the Physical Space of Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert

LAS VEGAS, Sept. 20, 2018 -- Smallworks Press, an independent publishing company specializing in limited edition, exquisitely-printed books focusing on contemporary art and culture, announced today that it has been selected to produce and distribute the highly-anticipated photography collection of Will Roger, a cultural co-founder of Burning Man. What started with a few people burning a human effigy on a San Francisco beach in 1986 has become a global phenomenon with an eight day event of more than 70,000 people and associated Burning Man regional events around the world. The temporary Black Rock City, located 100 miles northwest of Reno in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, is home to Burning Man, a festival dedicated to art, community, anti-consumerism and self-expression. The 2018 festival concluded on Labor Day weekend, Sept. 3.

Compass of the Ephemeral: Aerial Photography of Black Rock City through the Lens of Will Roger is scheduled for release in June 2019. The work includes a substantial collection of Roger’s aerial photos chronicling the ever-changing cityscape and transformation of the temporary Black Rock City – complete with typical city infrastructure – and the innovative Burning Man art installations both of which are created and taken down year after year. The collection also includes interpretive essays by William L. Fox, director of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment; Alexei Vranich, American archeologist at the University of California, Berkley; Tony “Coyote” Perez-Banuet, city superintendent of Black Rock City; Crimson Rose, co-founder of Burning Man, and an introduction by Harley K. DuBois, co-founder of Burning Man, exploring the cultural context and impact of the Burning Man festival.

“Burning Man is blank canvas for people to come and create on,” said Roger. “Burning Man creates a human empathy, then serendipity and creativity happens. Burning Man is the real world; everything else is the default world. People come away with changed lives and a changed culture because at Burning Man, everyone is human . . . there is no class, no color. You become family: human family, world family, global family.”

“We could not be more delighted that Will Roger chose Smallworks Press as his official publisher,” said James Stanford, founder and editor. “Since 2006, Smallworks Press has been producing exceptional visual and interpretive works that reflect the interconnectivity of art and community, a vision that Roger has made tangible each year for the past 14 years, by visually documenting the uniqueness of Burning Man and Black Rock City and by his involvement and contributions to the Burning Man culture and infrastructure.”

Roger’s autobiography, In Search of the Common Shaman, also will be released next year by Smallworks Press. The mystical memoir is not just the story of Roger’s life, but it is also a reflection of the universal journey, the shared search for reconnection, and the moment of the “re-wild and re-energization of the divine power that dwells inside us,” as Roger describes it.

His self-exploration is a powerful fusion of methods, ideas, and intentional mindsets seeking to revitalize the magic and mystical energy not only in his life, but within each person. Based upon the microcosm of personal experience, In Search of the Common Shaman explores more universal themes, combining enhanced connectedness, heightened experiences, and the intensified magical wonderment of life on earth.

Roger is a contributor to the current No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man exhibit at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Among his pieces are aerial photographs of Black Rock City, including the cover photo of Compass of the Ephemeral: Aerial Photography of Black Rock City through the Lens of Will Roger. The exhibit features large-scale installations – the artistic hallmark of Burning Man – and other festival items and runs through Jan. 21, 2019. In conjunction with No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man, Roger was a featured speaker at the Sept. 14 symposium, Radical Inclusion and Tales from the Playa: Talks on Art, Inspiration, and the History of Burning Man. His presentation covered how Burning Man has become an iconic cultural phenomenon in such a short time and what’s behind the development of Black Rock City.

About Will Roger

Will Roger discovered Burning Man in 1994, through his life partner Crimson Rose. Together and with several others, they are co-founders of Black Rock City, LLC, the company that has produced the Burning Man event for nearly 20 years. As a cultural co-founder of Burning Man, Roger also founded and managed the Black Rock City Department of Public Works – a team of several hundred people responsible for pre-event and post-event construction logistics and production. He is the co-founder of the Black Rock Art Foundation, a founding board member of Burning Man Project, and vice-president of Friends of the Black Rock/High Rock. Roger is heavily involved in conservation efforts for the Black Rock Desert, which is the United States’ largest National Conservation Area (NCA), and which is home to the Burning Man event. He served as Chairman of the Sierra Front – North Western Great Basin – Resource Advisory Council (RAC), and is currently a member of the RAC NCA Subgroup. Roger is also an accomplished photographer; and for nearly 20 years, he served at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., as a photo chemist, administrator, associate professor, and assistant director.

About Smallworks Press

Founded in 2006, Smallworks Press specializes in arts and culture publications and treats each book with a commitment to impeccable production, design and marketing. With more than 100 years of collective experiences, the Smallworks Press team has enjoyed collaborating with a wide-spectrum of artists, authors and talent to create works with beautiful chromatic illustrations and stimulating interpretation with the finest print quality. Smallworks Press has fulfillment thru Midpoint (North America), a subsidiary of Ingram Content Group, and CBL Distribution (United Kingdom). For information, visit www.smallworkspress.com, email info@smallworkspress.com or call 702-577-6592.

Radical Inclusion and Tales from the Playa - Session 2 →

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.

Lose Yourself in No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man →

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

This Exhibit Brings the Spirit of Burning Man to D.C. Well, Minus the Drugs, Sex and Sand →

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

Burning Man Goes to Washington →

Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, “Ursa Major” (2016) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

In an exhibition opening March 30, the Renwick Gallery has transported some of that Burning Man spirit to its more buttoned-down environs a stone’s throw from the White House. For the first time at the Renwick, an exhibition is spilling out of the museum’s doors onto the streets of downtown DC, with six large sculptures, including “Ursa Major,” taking up residence on sidewalks and medians through a partnership with the downtown-area Golden Triangle Business Improvement District.

Inside the museum, the Renwick will show 14 installations that were displayed at Burning Man or were commissioned from Burning Man artists, along with smaller artwork, handmade jewelry, costumes, photos, and memorabilia. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man is so large and technically complex that the entire museum was closed to the public for almost a month, the first time the museum has closed for an extended period since reopening in 2015 after a two-year renovation. > Hyperallergic, Read More

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man at the Renwick Gallery, installation view (photo by Ron Blunt)

Will the Art of Burning Man Survive in Museums?

At the end of the summer, for one week only, hundreds of giant fantastical sculptures and whimsical roving vehicles appear, then disappear like a shimmering mirage in the Nevada desert. We’re talking about Burning Man, the notoriously free-spirited annual spectacle that has occupied a dry lake bed outside Reno for nearly 30 years.

Depictions of Burning Man tend to focus on the hedonistic antics of attendees, but from the beginning, when its co-founder, Larry Harvey, burned a wooden effigy as a summer solstice ritual on a San Francisco beach in 1986, art has been part of its DNA, and increasingly the museum world is taking notice. When Burning Man started selling tickets in the mid-1990s, it began giving away artist grants. That support, now totaling around $1.3 million annually, plus quiet funding from Silicon Valley, has allowed Burning Man’s art projects to grow in ambition and quality.

A generation of volunteers spawned more artists, turning Burning Man into “an informal but very effective art school,” as Mr. Harvey put it. Pointing to these apprentices and what he called “enlightened patronage,” he sees parallels in the blossoming of art at Burning Man and the Italian Renaissance, its art theme in 2016. > New York Times, Read More

Top Reasons to See No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man →

The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum will transform for No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, an exhibit of enormous scale that is sure to create a sustained buzz all over DC and captivate visitors through Jan. 21, 2019.

According to the show’s curator Nora Atkinson, “Burning Man is all about human connection in a time when we’ve gone so fully digital.” While that won’t stop visitors from pulling out their phones to Instagram eye-opening installations, it may challenge museum-goers to identify with a collective experience rooted in human creativity. > Washington Guide, Read More

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man | Smithsonian American Museum of Art

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

City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man

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

Rare Burning Man Photos, Journals, Artifacts Coming to Nevada Museum of Art →

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)

City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man →

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

The Darkest Town in America →

Five years ago, NASA launched a satellite that’s roughly the size of a minivan and that circles our planet 14 times a day. Its largest instrument collects information from across the electromagnetic spectrum over land, ice and ocean. Scientists analyzed its data and combined that with measurements taken on the ground to map our planet’s light pollution. Only a few small areas in the U.S. remain mostly untouched. > Read More

Photo Exhibit at U.S. Capitol Celebrates Nevada's Public Lands →

Seventeen images of diverse, federally managed lands in Nevada are on display in the U.S. Senate’s Russell Building Rotunda. The exhibit, Home Means Nevada, organized by the non-profit group National Parks Conservation Association’s (NPCA), is intended to educate lawmakers about the unique aspects of Nevada’s public lands.

The images, including an aerial by Will Roger Peterson, will be shown from September 26-30, 2016. > Read More

Photo Exhibit Brings Splendor of Nevada to Capitol Hill →

Some of the Silver State’s most spectacular landscapes went on display Monday in Washington, D.C., as a weeklong photo exhibit called “Home Means Nevada” debuted in the rotunda of the Senate Russell Building.

The display of 17 images by 16 photographers highlights some of the unique treasures to be found on federally managed lands across the state, from bighorns to Burning Man, ancient rock art to Michael Heizer’s modern masterwork City. > Read More

Crimson & Will, Global Glue Project →

An inspirational short film documentary featuring the dynamic love affair between Crimson Rose and Will Roger Peterson.

> Watch Film